Skip to main content
Main

Fish in White Sauce

A simple fish dish simmered in a white sauce of rice flour, milk, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Fish in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the rice flour, milk, white stock, pepper, and salt together.

  2. Stir over medium heat until boiling.

Add the fish and serve

  1. Boil for five minutes, then add the fish cut into neat pieces.

  2. Cook for two minutes, add lemon juice, and serve immediately.

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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  4. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Milk + fishtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Milk or cream
Adds richness and a creamy body to the sauce.
White stock
Provides the savory liquid base of the sauce.
White fish
Supplies the main protein and the substance of the dish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir until the sauce boils. Rice flour must be evenly dispersed in the liquid and heated to thicken. Stirring over medium heat keeps the starch from clumping and lets it swell into a smooth sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, milk, fish, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, milk, fish, pepper. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipes