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Sauce

Plain Sauce for Boiled Fish

A simple sauce made by thickening fish cooking water with flour and optionally adding parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,675 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Sauce for Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with a small amount of cold water until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the strained fish cooking water while stirring well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a small saucepan and stir until it boils.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with the fish.

  2. If using parsley, wash and dry it before chopping, and add it only after the sauce has boiled.

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. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Fish + parsleytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,341 recipes

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

  3. Flour + fishtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Fish cooking water
Forms the liquid base that gives the sauce its fish flavour.

The step that matters

Stir the flour mixture smooth before adding the liquid. Flour clumps if it meets hot liquid unmixed. Blending it with cold water first and adding the liquid gradually keeps the starch dispersed, so the sauce thickens evenly without lumps.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, fish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, fish. 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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