Skip to main content
Main

Steamed Whitefish

Steamed whitefish stuffed with salt pork and bread, served with a butter‑flour gravy and garnished with eggs and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Steamed Whitefish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Chop the bread and salt pork very fine.

  2. Stuff the fish with the mixture.

  3. Sew the fish up.

  4. Wrap the fish in a cloth.

Steam and make the gravy

  1. Place the wrapped fish in a steamer.

  2. Steam for 45 minutes.

  3. Dissolve the flour in a little milk.

  4. Add the flour mixture to the boiling water with butter and cream.

  5. Boil the eggs hard.

  6. Slice the boiled eggs.

  7. Add the sliced eggs to the gravy boat.

  8. Garnish the fish with parsley before serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Whitefish + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Whitefish
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming moist and flaky when gently steamed.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that bastes the fish and enriches the stuffing.
Bread
Soaks up fat and juices, giving the stuffing a soft, moist texture.
Flour
Thickens the boiling liquid into a smooth gravy as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the gravy, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Dissolve the flour in a little milk before adding it to the boiling water. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps as its starch surface gelatinizes unevenly. Mixing it into cold milk first spreads the starch evenly, so the gravy thickens smoothly.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes