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Broiled Carp with Caper Sauce

A carp fillet broiled and served with a sauce of butter, flour, capers, anchovy essence, nutmeg, vinegar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Broiled Carp with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carp

  1. Kill the carp by striking its head with a large knife.

  2. Remove the scales starting from the tail, then the belly and the other side.

  3. Remove the gills carefully without damaging the tongue.

  4. Make small incisions in the neck and belly to remove the roe, intestines, and guts.

  5. Wash the carp thoroughly until no blood remains and wipe it dry.

  6. Slit both sides of the back and marinate in oil, salt, and pepper for about an hour.

Broil and make the sauce

  1. Broil the carp over a slow fire until cooked through, turning occasionally.

  2. For the sauce, melt ¼ pound of butter in a saucepan, add flour, salt, nutmeg, pepper, vinegar, and enough water to thicken. Stir the sauce over heat until combined and thickened.

Serve

  1. Serve the broiled carp with caper sauce and garnish with chopped parsley and butter inside the body.

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. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  4. Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Capers + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together211 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 protein; broiling cooks its flesh through while the marinade seasons it.
Oil
Carries the seasoning into the fish and helps keep the surface from drying during broiling.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny flavour that contrasts with the rich butter sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce over heat after adding the flour. Flour must be cooked with the melted butter and stirred continuously; otherwise it stays lumpy and tastes raw, and the sauce may scorch on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, capers, parsley, butter, vinegar, sauce, flour):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, capers, parsley, butter, vinegar, sauce, flour. 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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