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Baked Black Bass

A baked black bass served with a sherry‑catsup sauce and sweet‑cream buttered parsley potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Baked Black Bass

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.

Bake the fish

  1. Preheat the oven to 400 °F (200 °C).

  2. Place the cleaned and salted black bass in a baking pan with ½ cup of water.

  3. Strew flakes of butter on top, and season with coarse sea salt, pepper, and chopped parsley.

  4. Bake for about 1 hour, basting often until browned.

  5. Serve on a heated platter, garnished with parsley and lemon.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, combine 1 glass of sherry and a little catsup in the fish gravy.

  2. Thicken the sauce with 1 teaspoon of flour.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. For the potatoes, boil them as usual.

  2. In a saucepan, heat 2 tablespoons of butter, add chopped parsley, and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Stir in ½ cup of sweet cream thickened with 1 tablespoon of flour, and pour over the potatoes.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Black bass
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole in the pan.
Butter
Melts over the fish, adding richness and helping it brown in the oven.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce poured over the potatoes.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the fish and potatoes rather than running thin.

The step that matters

Basting the bass during the hour of baking. Regular basting moistens the surface with the pan juices and fat, so the fish stays moist while it browns instead of drying out over the long bake.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sherry, flour, cream. 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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