Name: Baked White Fish or Pickerel
Ingredients: 1 fish (3 to 4 pounds); Coarse sea salt; Black pepper; Stuffing (for poultry, but drier); Drippings; 2 tablespoons butter; Flour; Thin slices of salt pork or additional butter

Why it works: Fish and pork work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 668 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Baked White Fish or Pickerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

Clean, rinse, and wipe dry the fish.
Rub the inside and outside with coarse sea salt and black pepper.
Fill the fish with a drier poultry-style stuffing and sew it up.

Bake

Place the fish in a hot pan with drippings and 2 tablespoons of butter.
Dredge the fish with flour and lay thin slices of salt pork or bits of butter on top.
Bake for 1.5 hours, basting occasionally.

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.

Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together668 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + porktop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,933 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,121 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Fish: Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through in the oven.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, helping the surface brown and flavor the fish.
Flour: Dusted on the fish, it helps form a light crust that browns during baking.
Salt pork: Adds fat that bastes the fish and contributes savory flavor as it renders.
Drippings: Provide fat and savory flavor for the hot pan, helping the fish brown.

The step that matters

Baking with basting. Fish is lean and dries out quickly in a hot oven. Basting with fat during the 1.5 hours keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly.

“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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Baked White Fish or Pickerel