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Baked Haddock

A whole haddock stuffed with veal, ham, and bread crumbs, baked with butter or an egg‑flour batter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Baked Haddock

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

  1. Clean the fish by scraping and gutting it carefully.

  2. Stuff the fish with a mixture of veal, chopped ham, and bread crumbs.

  3. Sew the fish closed with strong thread and shape it into a circle, placing its tail in its mouth. Alternatively, place two fish tail to head on a dish.

  4. Cover the fish with plenty of butter or a batter made of eggs and flour, then sprinkle with bread crumbs.

Bake and serve

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and bake the fish for about 1 hour.

  2. Serve on the baking tin or a platter, and consider mussel sauce as an accompaniment.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

Eggs
Bind the coating together and help it set into a golden crust during baking.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture to the surface, helping it brown and keeping the fish from drying out.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on the outside while absorbing moisture from the fish.
Flour
Thickens the egg batter so it clings to the fish and sets into a coating.

The step that matters

Covering the fish with butter or batter. Plenty of butter or a well-mixed egg and flour batter protects the surface from drying during the long bake and helps the bread crumbs brown evenly.

“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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