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Plain Sauce Foe Boiled Fish

A simple sauce made from flour, fish cooking water, optional vinegar and butter, served with boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Plain Sauce Foe Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with a little cold water until smooth.

  2. Add the fish cooking water gradually, stirring constantly.

  3. Heat the mixture in a small saucepan until it boils.

Finish and serve

  1. Serve with the fish.

  2. If using butter, melt it before adding to the sauce.

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. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Fish + vinegartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,036 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  5. Flour + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated in liquid.
Fish cooking water
Forms the liquid base and carries the flavour of the fish.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Add the liquid gradually while stirring. Flour clumps if it meets liquid all at once. Blending it smooth first and adding the cooking water slowly lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens without lumps when it heats.

“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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