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Skate with Caper Sauce

A skate fish simmered in vinegar, salt, pepper, onion, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and water, served with caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Skate with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the skate

  1. In a fish kettle, combine skate, vinegar, salt, pepper, onion, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and enough warm water to cover the fish.

  2. Simmer the skate until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cooked, carefully remove the skin from the skate.

  2. Pour some of the cooking liquid over the skate and drain well.

  3. Place the skate on a hot dish, drizzle with caper sauce, and serve the remaining sauce in a sauceboat.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Skate
Is the main protein, becoming flaky and tender when gently simmered.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the mild flavour of the fish during poaching.
Caper sauce
Adds a sharp, buttery counterpoint that complements the delicate poached fish.

The step that matters

Simmer the skate until tender. Simmering gently keeps the liquid below a hard boil, so the delicate flesh cooks evenly and stays moist instead of breaking apart or toughening.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, pepper, parsley, thyme, fish, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, pepper, parsley, thyme, fish, sauce. 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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