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To Stew Carp

A carp stew made with broth, wine, onions, horseradish, herbs, spices, anchovies, lemon peel, cream, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

To Stew Carp

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the carp

  1. Place the carp in a stewpan with the meat broth or fish gravy.

  2. Add the white wine, onions, horseradish, sweet herbs, cayenne, black pepper, and salt.

  3. Let the mixture stew for about 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, combine white wine, anchovies, onion, lemon peel, cream, and some of the fish cooking liquid.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks and gently boil for a few minutes.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Horseradish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the cream sauce as they set when gently heated.
Thick cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, softening its flavor.
Anchovies
Contribute savory depth that rounds out the sauce.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during stewing.

The step that matters

Boiling the egg yolks into the sauce. Egg yolks thicken by setting when heated, but if they get too hot or boil hard they can curdle and turn grainy. Keep the heat gentle and stir well.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, white wine, horseradish, pepper, lemon, cream, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, white wine, horseradish, pepper, lemon, cream, egg. 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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