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Roast Fish

Roast Fish stuffed with a crumbly bread, butter, pepper, and salt mixture, then coated in flour and roasted with sweet lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, wash, and dry the fish with a cloth.

  2. Mix crumbled stale bread with softened butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Fill the fish with the mixture and sew it up.

Roast

  1. Place the fish in a pan.

  2. Dredge the fish with flour, a little salt, and pepper.

  3. Add some sweet lard.

  4. Roast until it is a nice brown.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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, cooked whole so the filling stays moist inside.
Stale bread
Absorbs the butter and juices in the stuffing, giving it a crumbly, tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the stuffing and helps it brown.
Flour
Coats the outside of the fish, helping it develop a golden, browned crust.
Sweet lard
Adds fat to the pan that promotes browning and crisping of the surface.

The step that matters

Roast until it is a nice brown. Browning depends on surface dryness and enough fat. Because the fish is whole and stuffed, its thickest part may stay underdone while the outside darkens, so the cook must judge doneness by the flesh, not colour alone.

“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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