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Baked Fish

A baked fish served with toasted bread, sweet pork, hard boiled eggs, and a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash and dry the fish thoroughly, then salt it.

  2. Stuff the fish with toasted bread and sweet pork slices.

  3. Place a thin muslin cloth under the fish in a dripping pan.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the fish.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 1 hour.

  3. For the sauce, mix sweet butter and flour until smooth.

  4. Pour 1 pint of boiling water into the butter‑flour mixture, adding salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Slice the hard boiled eggs and lay them on the fish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the fish just before serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Pike or salmon
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to flaky, moist flesh in the oven.
Toasted bread
Stuffed inside the fish, where it absorbs juices and adds soft texture.
Sweet pork
Lies inside the fish, adding fat and savoury flavour as it cooks.
Sweet butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, carrying flavour and smoothness.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth, pourable sauce.
Hard boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, mild texture laid over the fish.

The step that matters

Make the sauce smooth before adding the boiling water. Flour mixed into butter must be blended smooth before liquid is added; otherwise it forms lumps that do not dissolve evenly, leaving a grainy sauce.

“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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