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To Stuff and Bake Fish

Bread and butter mixture is stuffed into fish and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

To Stuff and Bake Fish

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Soak stale bread in cold water until soft, then drain and mash it fine.

  2. Stir in a spoonful of drawn butter, a little salt, pepper, and spices if desired.

Stuff and bake

  1. Fill the fish with the mixture and sew it up.

  2. In a baking pan, add a little water and a small lump of butter, then place the fish in the pan.

  3. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes until cooked through.

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. Bread + fishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + fishtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,948 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Absorbs water and forms the soft, moist body of the stuffing.
Drawn butter
Adds fat for richness and a moist, tender texture in the stuffing.
Fish
Forms the main body that is filled, then cooked through in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake for 40 to 50 minutes until cooked through. Fish cooks quickly and dries out if overbaked, while underbaking leaves it unsafe to eat. The stuffing needs to be heated through as well, so checking for doneness at the thickest part is important.

“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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