Skip to main content
Main

Baked Fish.— a LA Creme

A baked halibut served in a creamy sauce with onions, parsley, and cayenne, topped with breadcrumbs and hard‑boiled egg slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Baked Fish.— a LA Creme

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 fish

  1. Boil the halibut until done, then skin and remove bones, flaking the fish.

Make the cream

  1. In a pot, boil the milk with the chopped onion, parsley, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  2. Thicken the milk with flour or butter.

Bake and serve

  1. Butter a dish and layer fish and cream alternately, finishing with cream on top.

  2. Sprinkle with bread or cracker crumbs and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  3. Garnish with parsley and slices of hard boiled egg 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Halibut
Forms the flaky body of the dish, providing the main protein and texture.
Milk
Forms the creamy sauce that moistens the fish as it bakes.
Flour or butter
Thickens the milk into a cream that holds the layers together.
Bread or cracker crumbs
Forms a crisp topping that browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Thicken the milk. Flour or butter must be fully cooked into the hot milk so the cream thickens smoothly without lumps and holds the layers together during baking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, parsley, pepper, flour, bread, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, parsley, pepper, flour, bread, egg. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes