Name: Baked Fish
Ingredients: 1 whole fish; coarse sea salt; butter; water

Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baked Fish

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

1 whole fish
coarse sea salt
butter
water

Directions

The book says “a very hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

Open the fish so it lies flat.
Rub coarse sea salt over the fish.
Place the fish skin side down in a baking dish.
Add a little butter and water.

Bake and serve

Bake in a very hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes until golden brown.

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.

Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whole fish: Forms the main body of the dish and provides the flesh that cooks through in the oven.
Butter: Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the surface brown in the hot oven.

“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.