Skip to main content
Main

Baked Fish

A whole fish stuffed with bread crumbs, butter, herbs, and spices, baked with a tomato‑based gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean, wash, and wipe the fish.

  2. Make a stuffing with bread crumbs, butter, salt, pepper, and herbs.

  3. Stuff the fish and sew it up.

Bake and serve

  1. Place in a baking pan with 1 cup of water to prevent burning.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour, basting with butter and water until tender and browned.

  3. Transfer to a hot dish and cover tightly.

  4. In the same pan, boil the gravy with catsup, flour mixed with cold water, lemon juice, and sherry if desired.

  5. Remove the thread 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 to tender flesh in the oven.
Bread crumbs
Absorb butter and juices to form a moist, savory stuffing inside the fish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and promotes browning on the surface during baking.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the pan juices into a smooth gravy when mixed with cold water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the gravy and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Bake at 400°F until tender and browned. Basting with butter and water keeps the surface from drying out while the fish cooks through. Pulling it too early leaves the flesh underdone, and too long dries it, so check that it flakes easily.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, bread, butter, pepper, flour, sherry):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Plumfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, bread, butter, pepper, flour, sherry. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipes