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How to Roast and Bake Fish

A fish baked in a spiced broth with horseradish, oysters, ketchup, and butter, then finished with fried bread and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

How to Roast and Bake Fish

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 poaching liquid

  1. Fill a baking dish with water and add onion, lemon peel, horseradish, pepper, mace, and nutmeg.

  2. Plunge the fish into the water, flour the part above water, and dot with butter pieces.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until cooked through.

  2. Transfer the fish to a clean dish and pour the baking liquid into a saucepan.

  3. Add wine or vinegar, chopped oysters, ketchup, and butter rolled in flour to the saucepan.

  4. Stir until boiling, then pour over the fish.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with fried bread and sliced lemon.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, and the flour coating helps thicken it.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and helps the fish surface brown lightly.
Wine or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until boiling, after adding the flour-rolled butter. Butter rolled in flour thickens the sauce only when it is stirred and brought to a boil, so the starch cooks out and the sauce becomes smooth rather than pasty or thin.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, lemon, horseradish, pepper, nutmeg, flour):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, lemon, horseradish, pepper, nutmeg, flour. 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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