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Milk Sauce for Fish

A creamy sauce made from milk, flour, butter, onion, parsley, salt, and pepper, used for fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Milk Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring 1 pint of milk to a boil in a saucepan with the onion and parsley.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour with part of the remaining ½ pint of milk to form a smooth paste.

  3. Add the rest of the milk to the paste to make it very thin.

  4. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling milk.

  5. Boil for an additional 10 minutes.

  6. Add the butter and salt, then strain the sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour paste smooth before adding it to the boiling milk. Flour clumps if it meets hot liquid without being fully dispersed in cold milk first. Thinning the paste gradually lets the starch spread evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly rather than lumpy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, butter, parsley, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, parsley, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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