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Baked Fish

A whole fish seasoned, stuffed, and baked with a butter‑egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Rub the fish inside and out with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Make a dry dressing of bread crumbs and seasoning, then stuff the fish and sew it up.

  3. Cut gashes two inches apart and lay in slices of salt pork.

  4. Dredge the fish with flour and place it in a dripper with meat drippings or butter and ½ cup of water.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 1 to 2 hours, depending on the size of the fish.

  2. For the sauce, melt ½ cup of butter, then whisk in the yolks of 2 eggs, juice of ½ lemon, ¼ teaspoon salt, and ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper.

  3. Add 2 cups of boiling water and cook for about 5 minutes until slightly thickened.

  4. Pour the sauce around the fish and serve.

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. Pork + meattop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Fish + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the butter sauce and give it a rich, creamy body.
Butter
Melted butter adds richness and fat to the sauce and helps keep the fish moist.
Salt pork
Slices laid into the fish render fat that flavours and moistens the flesh as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Dry crumbs with seasoning form a stuffing that absorbs juices and holds its shape.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the sauce boils hard after the yolks go in, they can scramble and turn grainy. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly.

“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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