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Skate with Brown Butter Sauce

A fish dish of skate cooked in browned butter, seasoned with salt and pepper, served with lemon wedges.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Skate with Brown Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Clean the skate and cut it into portions.

Cook

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat until it turns golden brown.

  2. Add the skate pieces to the skillet.

  3. Cook for about 5-7 minutes on each side until cooked through.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. Serve with lemon wedges.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Skate
Provides the main protein, which firms and turns opaque as it cooks through.
Butter
Browns into nutty-flavored brown butter and carries heat evenly across the skillet.

The step that matters

Melting the butter until golden brown. Butter's milk solids brown through the Maillard reaction, giving the sauce its nutty flavor. Removing it too early leaves a flat, pale sauce, while letting it go too long turns it bitter and dark.

“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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