Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Fish

A dish of leftover fish simmered in milk and thickened with butter and flour, served with baked potatoes and garnished with hard‑boiled egg slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Fish

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the fish in hot milk.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan.

  3. Add the flour.

  4. Gradually pour in the hot milk.

  5. Stir until the mixture thickens slightly.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the fish.

  2. Cook gently for one minute.

  3. Transfer to a hot platter.

  4. Garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs.

  5. Serve with baked potatoes.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

Left-over fish
Forms the main body of the dish, flaked into the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour in the roux base.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce when cooked with butter.

The step that matters

Add the hot milk gradually. Pouring the milk in slowly while stirring keeps the flour and butter blended, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, milk, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, milk, butter, flour, egg. 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes