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Boiled Bass with Green Peas

A boiled sea bass served with butter sauce and green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Bass with Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scale and clean the fish.

  2. Sever the bone by inserting a knife at the serving points.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the fish in salted water for about 15 minutes.

  2. Peel off the upper skin after cooking.

  3. Place the fish on a dish and pour butter sauce over it.

  4. Arrange green peas around the fish.

  5. If serving individually, remove the head before cooking and pour a spoonful of butter sauce and a tablespoon of green peas over each portion.

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. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Sauce + peastop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Sea bass
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into moist, flaky pieces when boiled.
Butter sauce
Adds richness and moisture, coating the fish and balancing its mild flavour.
Green peas
Add sweetness and a contrasting texture alongside the soft fish.

The step that matters

Boiling the fish in salted water. Boiling for too long toughens and dries the flesh, while too little time leaves it undercooked near the bone. Salted water seasons the fish as it cooks.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce. 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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