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To Boil Rock-fish, Black-fish, and Sea- Bass

A boiled fish dish using rock fish, black fish, or sea bass, seasoned with coarse sea salt and optional saltpetre, served with eggs and sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and celery work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 353 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Boil Rock-fish, Black-fish, and Sea- Bass

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the fish thoroughly, especially the backbone.

  2. Place the fish in a fish kettle and cover with cold water.

  3. Add a handful of coarse sea salt and a pinch of saltpetre, if using.

Cook

  1. Heat over moderate heat and skim off any scum.

  2. Let it boil gently until cooked through.

Serve

  1. Drain the fish and serve garnished with halved hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Serve with celery sauce, anchovy sauce, or plain melted butter.

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 + celerytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together353 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Fish + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,782 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + celerytop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rock-fish, black-fish, or sea-bass
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into firm, flaky flesh in gently simmering water.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water so the fish is lightly flavoured as it poaches.

The step that matters

Let it boil gently until cooked through.. Boiling too hard breaks the delicate flesh apart and toughens it, so keep the water at a gentle simmer until the fish is evenly opaque and flakes easily.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, 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.

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