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Boiled Whiting

A simple boiled fish dish using whiting, salt, and water, served with parsley, anchovy or caper sauce, and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Whiting and fish work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 317 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Whiting

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the whiting fish without skinning them.

Poach

  1. Place the fish in a kettle and cover with cold water, adding the salt.

  2. Bring the water to a boil gradually, then simmer gently for about 5 minutes, longer if the fish are large.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish on a hot napkin, garnished with parsley.

  2. Accompany with anchovy or caper sauce and plain melted butter.

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. Whiting + fishtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Whiting fish
Forms the main dish; its firm, delicate flesh cooks through gently in the simmering water.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the poaching water so the fish is flavoured as it cooks.

The step that matters

Bring the water to a boil gradually, then simmer gently. Gentle heat keeps the water below a rolling boil, so the delicate fish flesh cooks evenly and stays moist instead of breaking apart or toughening.

“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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