Name: Stuffed Shad
Ingredients: 1 whole shad, cleaned and dried; Salt; Pepper; Flour; 4-5 very thin slices of salt pork; ½ cup boiling water; Browned butter sauce; Lemon juice; 1 glass of claret

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stuffed Shad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

Stuff the shad as you would a fowl and sew it up.
Dredge the fish with salt, pepper, and flour.

Bake

Lay 4-5 thin slices of salt pork in a baking pan.
Place the stuffed fish on top of the pork slices.
Cover the fish with more thinly sliced pork.
Pour in ½ cup of boiling water.
Bake for 12 minutes per pound.

Serve

Serve with browned butter sauce seasoned with lemon juice and a glass of claret.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,933 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter 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

Shad: Forms the main body of the dish, with its flesh cooking through in the oven.
Salt pork: Bastes the fish with its fat as it bakes, keeping the flesh moist and adding savory flavor.
Claret: Adds acidity and wine flavor to the browned butter sauce served with the fish.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, pork, butter, sauce):

Avocadofits better
Lemonthe original
Mangofits about as well
Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, pork, 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.