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Baked Fish

Baked fish stuffed with buttered bread and onion, baked with water and butter, served with lemon and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. 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.

Stuff and bake

  1. Stuff the cleaned fish with a dressing made from buttered bread, chopped onion, salt, and pepper softened with hot water.

  2. Sew the fish up.

  3. Place the sewn fish on skewers in a baking pan with 1 cup of water.

  4. Baste the fish often with butter and water while baking.

  5. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour until tender and brown.

Serve

  1. Transfer the fish to a hot dish.

  2. Remove the threads.

  3. Garnish with sliced lemon and parsley.

  4. Thicken the gravy with a little flour, butter, and lemon juice.

  5. Serve the gravy in a sauce boat.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 and cooks to a tender, flaky texture.
Bread
Soaks up moisture and cooking juices, giving the stuffing a soft, moist texture.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavor to the stuffing as it cooks inside the fish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and promotes browning during basting.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a smooth gravy.

The step that matters

Baste the fish often while baking. Fish is lean and dries out quickly in the oven. Regular basting with butter and water keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly, while the stuffing stays moist inside.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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