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Breakfast Fish

A fish dish simmered in fish liquor, sherry, and sauces, seasoned with cayenne, salt, mace, and flour, served with parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,057 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Breakfast Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Grease a porcelain saucepan with butter and lay the fish in it, flesh side down.

  2. Sprinkle each piece with cayenne, salt, mace, and flour.

  3. Pour 1 pint of fish liquor over the fish.

  4. Cover the saucepan.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Simmer gently for 20 minutes, shaking occasionally to prevent sticking.

  2. Add Reading sauce, anchovy sauce, and sherry.

  3. Rub butter and flour together, blend with a little gravy, and stir into the saucepan, stirring constantly.

  4. Add more seasoning if necessary.

  5. Let it simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish with parsley and lemon, pouring the gravy over the fish.

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. Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour 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

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked gently in the liquor.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and combined with flour it thickens the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the liquor into a gravy as it cooks with the butter.
Fish liquor
Provides the cooking liquid that becomes the flavourful gravy.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the saucepan. Adding the flour-butter paste to hot liquid without first blending it smoothly can cause lumps. Stirring constantly keeps the starch dispersed so the gravy thickens evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, pepper, flour, sauce, anchovy, sherry):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, pepper, flour, sauce, anchovy, sherry. 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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