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Boiled Fish

Boiled Fish is a simple dish where fish is cooked in salted water with vinegar and served with butter, tomato sauce, or milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and fish are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,036 recipes. Both carry acetoin, which smells butter, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill a pot with boiling water to cover the fish and salt it.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of vinegar for every 2 quarts of water.

  3. Dip a cloth in cold water, lay the fish in it, and fold the cloth around the fish.

  4. Pin the cloth together and place it in the boiling water.

Cook and serve

  1. Simmer until the fish is done: cod (30 minutes), halibut (45 minutes), mackerel (20 minutes).

  2. Lift out the cloth and roll the fish onto a serving dish.

  3. Serve with butter, tomato sauce, or milk sauce.

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. Vinegar + fishtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,036 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, 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 to a flaky texture as it simmers.
Vinegar
Adds a slight acidity to the poaching water that brightens the mild flavour of the fish.

The step that matters

Simmer until done. Simmering time depends on the type of fish. Overcooking dries out the flesh and makes it tough, so check doneness at the stated time for each fish.

“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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