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Baked Fish

A whole fish baked with fat salt pork, butter, and black pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Soak the fish in brine overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Layer and bake

  1. Lay the slices of pork in a baking tin where the fish will rest, then place a few pieces of butter and a little pepper on the pork.

  2. Stuff the fish with a couple of pieces of pork, butter, and pepper.

  3. Lay the fish in the tin on top of the pork, add more butter and pepper on top of the fish, and cover the fish with thin slices of pork.

  4. Bake until the fish is done and browned, about 1.5 hours.

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. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

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

  4. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Fish + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,948 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whole fresh fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through gently in the oven.
Fat salt pork
Bastes the fish with melting fat, adding moisture and savoury flavour as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the surface brown during baking.

The step that matters

Covering the fish with pork and butter before baking. The layer of pork and butter shields the fish from direct heat and slowly bastes it, keeping the flesh moist during the long, low-temperature bake.

“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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