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Half Large Boiled Fish

A boiled fish garnished with lobster and crawfish, served with lobster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and lobster work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 326 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Half Large Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fish and lobster

  1. Boil the fish in a special kettle to prevent breaking.

  2. Cook the lobster while the fish is boiling.

  3. Remove the meat from the lobster shell carefully.

  4. Cut away a portion of the under part of the lobster shell with a can-opener to extract the flesh intact.

Prepare the garnish and sauce

  1. Slice the lobster meat into large pieces for garnishing.

  2. Make lobster sauce with smaller pieces of lobster.

Serve

  1. Arrange the lobster and crawfish on the fish using a long ornamental skewer.

  2. Serve the lobster sauce with the boiled fish.

  3. Carve the fish, cutting from the outer edge towards the middle, following the dotted lines.

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. Fish + lobstertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together326 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Fish + parsleytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,341 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + lobstertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together890 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Its firm flesh holds together during long, gentle boiling and provides the main body of the dish.
Lobster
Its sweet meat supplies the garnish and the flavourful sauce.
Crawfish
Its meat adds extra sweetness and decorative colour when arranged on the fish.

The step that matters

Boil the fish in a special kettle. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil helps the delicate fish flesh stay whole instead of breaking apart.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, lobster):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, lobster. 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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