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Baking

Fish Pie

A baked dish of cooked fish layered with béchamel sauce, mushrooms, shallot, parsley, hard‑boiled eggs, and topped with pun paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fish Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the skin and bones from the cooked fish and cut the flesh into large scallops.

Assemble

  1. Cover the bottom of a dish with béchamel sauce.

  2. Layer the fish in the dish, seasoning each layer with pepper, coarse sea salt, nutmeg, chopped mushrooms, shallot, parsley, and hard‑boiled eggs.

  3. Pour in a little more béchamel sauce and fill the dish with the remaining fish and seasoning.

  4. Cover the dish with pun paste.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400 °F (200 °C) for about 45 minutes.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  4. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked fish
Forms the main body of the pie, providing flaky texture and savory flavor.
Bechamel sauce
Adds moisture and a creamy binding that keeps the layers together.
Hard-boiled eggs
Contribute richness and a firm, creamy texture to the filling.
Chopped mushrooms
Add moisture and earthy savoriness to the filling.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, sauce, pepper, mushroom, shallot, parsley, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, sauce, pepper, mushroom, shallot, parsley, egg. 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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