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Baked Fish

A whole fish baked with salt, pepper, butter, flour, and optional salt pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, rinse, and wipe the fish dry.

  2. Rub the fish inside and out with salt and pepper.

  3. Fill with a dry stuffing made for poultry and sew it up.

Bake

  1. Place in a hot pan with drippings and butter.

  2. Dredge with flour and lay slices of salt pork or bits of butter on top.

  3. 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.

  1. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. 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

White fish
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked through by baking.
Flour
Dusted over the fish to help form a browned, lightly crisped surface.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the fish brown and stay moist while baking.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor as it renders over the fish during baking.

The step that matters

Basting occasionally during the bake. Basting spoons hot fat over the surface, keeping the fish moist and encouraging even browning. Fish is lean and can dry out in a long bake, so skipping basting risks a dry, pale result.

“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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