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Fish Pudding

A steamed fish mixture with white sauce, eggs, and onion, served with lettuce, potato roses, lemon slices, and potato balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Snapper and sauce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fish Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cook the fish in water with a little coarse sea salt until tender.

  2. Remove from heat, pull apart, and take out all small bones.

  3. Mash the fish well.

Make the mixture

  1. Add white sauce, grated onion, and beaten eggs to the fish mixture.

  2. Grease a border mold and fill it with the fish mixture.

Steam and bake

  1. Steam in a pan of hot water for 40 minutes without boiling the water.

  2. Place in the oven covered with oil paper.

Serve

  1. Serve with white sauce on a platter of lettuce leaves, garnished with potato roses and lemon slices dipped in parsley. Fill the center with potato balls.

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. Snapper + saucetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Snapper + oniontop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Onion + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,333 recipes

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

  5. Egg + saucetop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,895 recipes

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 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

Red snapper
Forms the bulk of the pudding and firms up as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a sliceable shape when heated.
White sauce
Adds moisture and creaminess, keeping the fish mixture tender.
Grated onion
Adds aroma and a mild savory flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam without boiling the water. Gentle steam heats the egg-and-fish mixture evenly and keeps it smooth. A rapidly boiling pan sends bubbles and surges up the sides of the mold, which can leave the pudding pitted, rough or unevenly set.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (snapper, egg, sauce):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Welsh onionfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against snapper, egg, sauce. 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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