Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Carp

A boiled carp served with a sauce of vinegar, herbs, and wine, garnished with roe, lemon, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Horseradish and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Carp

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the carp

  1. Combine vinegar (or cider), water, horseradish, onion, salt, and sweet herbs in a large pot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add the carp to the pot.

  4. Boil the fish until cooked through.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, strain some of the cooking liquid.

  2. Mix the strained liquid with minced liver, port wine, anchovies, shallots, salt, black pepper, cayenne, and soy sauce.

  3. Boil the sauce.

  4. Strain the sauce again.

  5. Thicken the sauce with flour and butter.

Serve

  1. Serve the boiled carp hot, topped with the sauce, garnished with fried roe, lemon slices, and parsley.

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. Horseradish + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

  4. Port wine + shallottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  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

Carp
Is the main dish, cooked gently in the poaching liquid until it is firm and flaky.
Flour and butter
Thicken the strained sauce so it coats the fish instead of running off.
Port wine
Adds body, sweetness, and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Liver
Adds richness and a savoury, creamy body to the sauce.
Vinegar or cider
Provides acidity that sharpens the poaching liquid and balances the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the fish until cooked through. Carp is delicate and overcooking makes the flesh dry and crumbly, while undercooking leaves it unsafe to eat. Watch for flesh that flakes easily when tested with a fork.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, fish, horseradish, liver, port wine, shallot, pepper):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, fish, horseradish, liver, port wine, shallot, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipes