Name: Baked Halibut
Ingredients: 4 pounds halibut; flour for dredging; coarse sea salt; salt pork, cut into small pieces; hot water; butter; flour for gravy; water for gravy

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baked Halibut

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).
Place the halibut in a baking pan and dredge it with flour and coarse sea salt.
Sprinkle the small pieces of salt pork on top of the halibut.
Pour hot water into the pan.

Bake and make gravy

Bake for about 1 hour.
To make the gravy, melt butter in a saucepan, add flour, and gradually stir in water until desired consistency is reached.

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.

Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,933 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Flour + porktop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together11,187 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

Halibut: Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into flaky, tender pieces.
Salt pork: Adds fat and savory flavor as it renders over the fish during baking.
Flour: Dredging helps the fish's surface brown lightly and thickens the gravy.
Butter: Adds richness and flavor to the gravy.

“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.