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To Bake Fish

Fish baked with pork strips, water, butter, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and pork work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 668 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

To Bake Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash and dry the fish with a towel.

  2. Make gashes in the fish, half an inch deep and two inches long, spaced one inch apart.

  3. Lay strips of pork inside the gashes.

Bake

  1. Place the fish in a pan and cover the bottom with ½ cup of water.

  2. Add 2 teaspoons of butter and ¼ teaspoon of salt.

  3. Dredge the fish with flour and baste often.

  4. Keep adding gravy as it boils away.

  5. Check for doneness with a knitting needle and lift with a cake turner.

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

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

  2. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Pork + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the flavour of the pork and gravy.
Strips of pork
Adds savoury fat and flavour as it renders into the fish.
Flour
Dredging coats the fish so it browns and helps thicken the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the surface brown.

The step that matters

Basting and adding gravy. Basting often and adding liquid as it boils away keeps the fish moist and stops the flour coating and pan drippings from scorching or drying out 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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