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Baked Fish with Oysters

A haddock fillet baked with oysters, buttered cracker crumbs, and a beaten egg topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Fish with Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove skin, head, and bone from the haddock.

  2. Rub the fish with salt and lemon juice.

Assemble

  1. Place half of the fish on a greased baking sheet.

  2. Cover with cleaned oysters dipped in seasoned and buttered cracker crumbs.

  3. Lay the other half of the fish on top.

  4. Brush with beaten egg and cover with seasoned and buttered crumbs.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

  2. Serve with Hollandaise sauce.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Haddock + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together764 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Haddock
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into moist, flaky layers.
Oysters (in the method)
Add a briny, savory flavor and tender texture inside the fish.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that absorbs butter and seasoning.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the crumbs brown evenly in the oven.
Beaten egg
Binds the crumb topping and helps it set and brown.

The step that matters

Brush with beaten egg and cover with seasoned and buttered crumbs.. The egg coat holds the crumbs in place and helps them set and brown, so the topping does not slide off or stay pale during baking.

“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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