Skip to main content
Main

Remalade of Smelts

A fish sauce made by slowly boiling smelts with water, vinegar, sherry, mace, shallots, pepper, salt, and anchovies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Remalade of Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Poach

  1. Turn the smelts around and place them in a stewpan.

  2. Add water, vinegar, sherry wine, mace, shallots, whole white pepper, salt, and anchovies.

  3. Set the stewpan on the fire and let it boil very slowly for about 10 minutes.

  4. Remove the stewpan from the heat and take the smelts out with a slotted spoon.

Cool and serve

  1. Pour the cooking liquid over the smelts and let them cool.

  2. Once cold, strain the liquid over the smelts and garnish with parsley or chopped aspic.

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

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

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Vinegar + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Vinegar + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,493 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
Form the main body of the dish, becoming firm and tender when gently poached.
Vinegar
Acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the cooked fish in the pickling liquid.
Anchovies
Add a savoury, salty depth that enriches the cooking liquid.
Shallots
Contribute a mild, sweet onion-like aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Boil very slowly. Gentle heat keeps the delicate smelts intact and tender. A hard boil would break up the fish and make the flesh tough and ragged.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (smelt, vinegar, sherry, wine, mace, shallot, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against smelt, vinegar, sherry, wine, mace, shallot, parsley. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes