Name: Boiled Fish
Ingredients: 1 large fish; coarse sea salt; drawn butter

Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Fish

Ingredients

1 large fish
coarse sea salt
drawn butter

Directions

Prepare and cook

Wrap the fish in a cloth and secure it with string.
Place the wrapped fish in cold water and add salt.
Cook for about 30 minutes.

Serve

Remove the cloth and serve with drawn butter.

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.

Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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, cooking gently in the water to become flaky and moist.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the fish and water, adding flavour throughout the cooking liquid.
Drawn butter: Adds richness and fat that complements the mild, moist flesh of the boiled fish.