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Louisiana Baked Fish

Baked fish topped with Creole sauce and sliced hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Louisiana Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the fish in a little water, then pour off the water.

  2. Pour sauce a la Creole over the fish and bake.

  3. Slice the hard-boiled eggs over the baked fish and serve hot.

  4. For the sauce, heat bacon fat or lard in an iron skillet.

  5. Add chopped onions and fry until golden brown.

  6. Push onions to the side, add flour, and stir until golden brown.

  7. Add a little water, canned tomatoes, garlic, and season with salt, cayenne, and black pepper.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Tomato + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browned in the fat, it forms a roux that thickens the sauce.
Bacon fat or lard
Fat that fries the onions and browns the flour, carrying flavor into the sauce.
Onions
Browning them sweetens the flavor and builds the base of the sauce.
Canned tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid body to the sauce.
Garlic
Adds a sharp aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour stirred in hot fat can go from golden to burnt quickly. Burnt flour turns the roux bitter and dark, so stir steadily and watch the color closely.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, sauce, egg, onion, flour, tomato, garlic):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, sauce, egg, onion, flour, tomato, garlic. 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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