Skip to main content
Main

Turbots Et Grosses Barbues

A steamed turbot or large barbue seasoned with salt, milk, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turbot and milk work together. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 79 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Turbots Et Grosses Barbues

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scrape the barbue with a knife to remove scales before gutting.

  2. Make an incision along one side of the turbot's belly and remove the intestines.

  3. Wash the inside and outside of the turbot thoroughly.

  4. Cut along the back, about 3-4 inches long, and scrape along the backbone without piercing the skin.

  5. Remove the two knots from the backbone carefully.

  6. Tie the head with string through the gills and behind the bone under the belly.

  7. Trim the tail and fins, then rub the entire surface with fine white salt.

Steam

  1. Place the turbot in a fish steamer lined with a perforated sheet.

  2. Add enough water to cover the fish, along with 3-4 handfuls of salt and ½ cup of milk.

  3. Bring to a boil, then remove from heat and let it cook gently.

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. Turbot + milktop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together79 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Adds a mild, creamy note to the cooking liquid and helps keep the fish tender.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil, then remove from heat and let it cook gently. Boiling vigorously toughens fish proteins and breaks the flesh apart. Once the water boils, removing the pan from heat lets gentle residual heat cook the fish evenly and keep it moist.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes