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How to Stew Fish

A stew of cleaned fish cooked with butter, gravy, water, soy sauce, lemon, herbs, spices, onions, and optional wine, mushrooms, oysters, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

How to Stew Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Fry the cleaned fish in butter, lard, or dripping over a brisk fire until three-quarters cooked.

Make the stew

  1. Transfer the fish to a stewpan and add meat or fish gravy and water or broth.

  2. Stir in soy sauce or ketchup, lemon slices, sweet herbs, and seasonings.

  3. Fry the floured onions in the same fat until browned, then add them to the stewpan.

  4. Add wine, pickled mushrooms, and oysters for a richer gravy.

  5. Let the mixture stew gently for about an hour.

Serve

  1. Remove the fish and pour the gravy over it, garnishing with lemon slices and fried bread.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Fish + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 becomes tender as it stews in the gravy.
Butter, lard, or dripping
Carries heat for the initial frying and adds richness to the fish and onions.
Onions
Browning in fat builds savoury depth and sweetness that flavours the gravy.
Meat or fish gravy
Provides the liquid base and savoury body of the stew.
Soy sauce or ketchup
Adds savoury depth and a touch of acidity or sweetness to the gravy.

The step that matters

Frying the fish until three-quarters cooked. Searing over a brisk fire sets the outside so the fish holds its shape. Stopping early leaves room for the stewing to finish it without breaking it apart.

“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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