Name: Liver Sauce for Fish
Ingredients: liver of fish; ¼ cup drawn butter; 1 tablespoon ketchup; salt to taste; pepper to taste; lemon juice or vinegar (optional)

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 ↓

Liver Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the liver of the fish until tender enough to mash finely.
Stir the mashed liver into the drawn butter.
Add ketchup, salt, and pepper.
For an improvement, add a little lemon juice or vinegar.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,889 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Liver + buttertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,065 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

Liver of fish: Forms the body of the sauce, giving it a rich, savoury base once mashed.
Drawn butter: Adds fat and smooth richness, carrying flavour and helping the liver blend into a sauce.
Ketchup: Adds sweetness and tang, rounding out the savoury liver flavour.

“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.