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Cream Fish

A fish dish cooked in a creamy sauce with butter, flour, milk, onion, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cream Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Boil the fish until cooked.

  2. Let the fish cool.

  3. Pick the fish into pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Tie the onion in a bag.

  2. Boil the milk with the onion in the bag.

  3. Stir the butter and flour mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Cook the sauce thoroughly.

  5. Season the sauce with salt, red pepper, and chopped parsley.

Bake and serve

  1. Mix the sauce with the fish.

  2. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top.

  3. Bake 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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the main body and flaky texture of the dish.
Milk
Forms the base of the white sauce that binds the dish together.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter.
Onion
Infuses the milk with aroma while it is heated.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce thoroughly. Flour must be cooked fully after it is stirred into hot milk; undercooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste and weak thickening.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, milk, butter, flour, pepper, parsley, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, milk, butter, flour, pepper, parsley, bread. 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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