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To Boil Fish

A fish boiled with salt, vinegar, and milk, served with a butter‑flour‑egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Boil Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Salt the fish and place it in a cold place until ready to cook.

Boil the fish

  1. Boil the fish in a fish kettle or wrap it in a cloth and boil in any cooking vessel.

  2. Ensure the fish is covered with more than 2 inches of boiling water.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of vinegar for every pound of fish.

  4. Cook a good-sized fish for about 30 minutes.

  5. Be careful not to break the fish when removing it.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, stir a piece of butter mixed with flour into 1 pint of boiling milk.

  2. Add the chopped hard boiled egg to the sauce and pour it over the fish or serve it in a sauceboat.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

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

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in simmering water until it flakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, helps thicken it as a roux-style base.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture into a smooth sauce.
Hard boiled egg
Adds chopped texture and richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the fish submerged in gently boiling water. Fish proteins toughen and break apart when cooked too hard or too long, so the water should be kept at a steady boil with the fish fully covered and removed carefully.

“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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