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Sauce

Spanish Sauce for Fried Fish

A brown sauce made with butter, flour, fish stock, ham, celery, onion, cloves, carrot, peppercorns, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Spanish Sauce for Fried Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat until it turns nut brown.

  2. Add the flour and cook, stirring, until browned.

  3. Pour in the fish stock and add the ham, celery, onion, cloves, carrot, and peppercorns.

  4. Stir until boiling, then reduce heat and let simmer for at least 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce, then return it to the heat.

  2. Add the lemon juice and stir until boiling.

  3. Season with salt to taste 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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browned in the pan to give the sauce a nutty, rich flavor and fat base.
Flour
Cooked with the butter to thicken the sauce as it simmers.
Fish stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the fish flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. Cooking the butter until nut brown and the flour until browned builds the color and toasted flavor of the sauce. Stopping too early leaves it pale and flat, while going too far can make it bitter.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, fish, ham, celery, onion, carrot):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, fish, ham, celery, onion, carrot. 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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