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Baked Halibut Slices

A baked halibut dish with carrot, onion, parsley, bay leaf, peppercorns, lemon juice, and a mushroom butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Baked Halibut Slices

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fish

  1. Wipe the halibut slices and place them in a buttered granite pan.

  2. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, then add the carrot, onion, parsley, bay leaf, peppercorns, and lemon juice.

  3. Pour the boiling water over the fish and bake for 25 minutes at 400°F (200°C), basting every 5 minutes.

Serve and make the sauce

  1. Remove the fish from the oven, arrange on a hot serving dish, and remove the skin and bones.

  2. Sauté the mushroom caps in butter for 5 minutes and place them on top of the fish.

  3. For the sauce, melt 2 tablespoons of butter, add 2 tablespoons of flour, and gradually stir in the liquor from the pan until smooth.

  4. Strain the sauce, season with salt if needed, and slowly mix in the beaten egg yolk and cream.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Halibut
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the steam of the pan liquid.
Flour
Thickens the butter and pan liquor into a smooth sauce body.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce when mixed in gently at the end.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the sauce and sautéed mushrooms.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and cream. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heat; if the sauce is too hot when it is added, the yolk can scramble and turn grainy. Mixing slowly and off the heat keeps it smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, carrot, parsley, lemon, mushroom, butter, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, carrot, parsley, lemon, mushroom, butter, sauce. 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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