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Grilled Fish Bones

A dish of flounder bones grilled with a seasoned oil mixture and garnished with parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Grilled Fish Bones

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the ragged edges from the bones of the flounders used in making the filets.

Season

  1. Mix the oil, vinegar, and mustard together.

  2. Season the mixture well with pepper and salt.

  3. Spread the seasoned mixture over the bones with a knife.

Grill and serve

  1. Broil the bones on an oiled grill.

  2. Serve the bones on a hot dish with parsley sprigs or lemon slices around them.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Salad oil
Coats the bones so the seasoning spreads evenly and the surface does not stick to the grill.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the rich fish.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor and helps the seasoning cling to the bones.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, pepper, parsley, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, pepper, parsley, lemon. 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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