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Gravies for Fried Fish

A gravy made with fried fish, onions, butter, herbs, spices, and optional wine, pickled onions, mushrooms, oysters, and extra fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Gravies for Fried Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish and onions

  1. Fry the pieces of fish until brown, then remove and place in a stewpan with water or broth.

  2. Fry the coated onions in the butter used for the fish until brown, then add to the stewpan.

Make the gravy

  1. Add sweet herbs and butter or cream to the stewpan.

  2. Season with cayenne, black pepper, salt, nutmeg, lemon juice, and Cornubian sauce or lemon pickle.

  3. Let the mixture simmer until it thickens to a creamy consistency, reducing the liquid by one-third.

Add optional extras

  1. Optionally, add pickled onions, mushrooms, and oysters, including their liquor if fresh.

  2. For extra flavor, add wine and spare fish cutlets if needed.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softens and browns in butter, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the gravy a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Coats the onions and helps thicken the gravy as the liquid simmers.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture when used in place of butter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fried flavours of the gravy.

The step that matters

Simmering until creamy. Simmering reduces the liquid and lets the flour and onion starch thicken the gravy. Boiling hard or stopping too early can leave it thin or cause it to scorch on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, sauce, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, sauce, mushroom. 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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