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Baking

To Bake Fish

A baked fish stuffed with seasoned bread and pork, coated in flour and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

To Bake Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Spread butter on the bread and season with pepper and salt.

  2. Stuff the seasoned bread inside the fish and sew it up with a needle and thread.

  3. Place the fish in a dish and lay thin slices of pork on top.

  4. Sprinkle the fish with salt and coat it well with flour.

Bake

  1. Baste the fish with the cooking juices.

  2. Bake for 1 hour.

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. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown and taste savoury during baking.
Flour
Coats the fish so its surface browns and the cooking juices thicken slightly.
Pork
Lies over the fish, releasing fat that moistens the flesh and adds savoury flavour.
Bread
Fills the cavity, absorbing juices and adding body to the stuffed fish.

The step that matters

Basting with the cooking juices. Fish is lean and dries out quickly in dry heat. Spooning the juices back over it keeps the surface moist and carries heat and flavour into the flesh.

“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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