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Boiled Fish with Butter Sauce

A boiled freshwater fish served in a butter and parsley sauce with lemon and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Fish with Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the fish by removing the gills without splitting it open.

Poach the fish

  1. In a pot, combine water and milk, and bring to a boil.

  2. Add vinegar to the boiling liquid.

  3. Place the fish in the pot and boil until cooked through.

Make the butter sauce and serve

  1. In a separate saucepan, melt butter and add minced parsley.

  2. Remove the fish, pick out bones and skin, and add the flesh to the butter mixture.

  3. Add lemon juice, black pepper, salt, and cayenne if desired.

  4. Warm the mixture gently, shaking the pan until heated through, then serve.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  5. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh-water fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the simmering liquid until its flesh is firm.
Milk
Adds richness and a mild sweetness to the poaching liquid.
Vinegar
Acidity in the poaching liquid helps firm the fish's proteins and brightens the flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and a rich, silky texture to the sauce that coats the flaked fish.

The step that matters

Boil the fish until cooked through. Boiling too hard can break the delicate flesh apart, while under-cooking leaves it raw near the bone. Gentle, steady heat cooks it evenly while keeping it intact.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, milk, vinegar, butter, lemon, pepper):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, milk, vinegar, butter, lemon, 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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