Name: Fish and Clams, Seaside Fashion
Ingredients: wet rock-weed or sea-weed; clams; fish

Why it works: Clam and fish work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Fish and Clams, Seaside Fashion

Ingredients

wet rock-weed or sea-weed
clams
fish

Directions

Prepare the box

Remove the shelves from the oven.
Use a tin box of sufficient size and depth.

Layer the ingredients

Place a layer of wet rock-weed in the bottom of the box.
Add the clams on top of the rock-weed.
Add another layer of rock-weed over the clams.
Place the fish on top of the second layer of rock-weed.
Cover with more rock-weed.
If available, place a cover on the box.

Bake

Put the box into the oven and bake until cooked through.

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.

Clam + fishtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

What each ingredient does

Wet rock-weed or sea-weed: Forms layers that enclose the clams and fish, keeping them moist as they steam.
Clams: Release their liquor as they cook, adding moisture and briny flavour to the dish.
Fish: Provides the main protein, which cooks through in the enclosed, moist heat.

“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.