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Italian Sauce for Fish

A sauce made with shallots, butter, mushrooms, parsley, bay leaf, thyme, brown stock, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Italian Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the finely chopped shallots and fry until soft.

  3. Stir in the chopped mushrooms, parsley, bay leaf, and thyme.

  4. Pour in the brown stock and white wine, and bring to a boil.

  5. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve and serve.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 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

Shallots
Softened in butter, they add a mild, sweet aromatic base to the sauce.
Mushrooms
Release their savoury, earthy flavour into the sauce as they cook.
Brown stock
Forms the liquid body of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
White wine
Adds acidity and depth, and its flavour concentrates as the sauce boils.
Butter
Provides fat for frying the shallots and adds richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil. Boiling reduces the liquid and concentrates the wine and stock flavours. Keeping the shallots soft before adding liquid prevents harsh, raw onion taste in the finished sauce.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, butter, mushroom, thyme, white wine):

  1. Marjoramfits about as well
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, butter, mushroom, thyme, white wine. 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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