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Fish Stewed Brown

A fish stew made with brown sauce, onion, and spices, finished with port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 Stewed Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Fry the fish until light brown.

Make the gravy

  1. In a separate pan, brown the onion in oil.

  2. Add water, mushroom ketchup, cayenne pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemon juice to the onion.

  3. Place the fish in a stew-pan with the mixture and simmer gently until cooked.

  4. Remove the fish and thicken the gravy with browned flour.

  5. Stir in port wine and add truffles or mushrooms if desired.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 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

Fish
Forms the main body of the stew and carries the flavour of the gravy.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy and adds a toasty, nutty depth of flavour.
Onion
Browned in oil to build a sweet, savoury base for the gravy.
Oil
Conducts heat for browning the onion and carries flavour through the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury gravy.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer the fish gently until cooked. Fish is delicate and its proteins toughen and dry out if boiled hard, so a gentle simmer keeps it tender and intact in the stew.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, mushroom, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, flour, port wine):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, mushroom, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, flour, port wine. 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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