Skip to main content
Main

Baked Fish

A fish stuffed with salt pork and stuffing, baked with flour, salt, pepper, and fat pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the fish

  1. Sprinkle the fish with coarse sea salt and fill it with stuffing.

  2. Sew or skewer the edges together.

  3. Cut gashes on each side of the fish and insert strips of salt pork into them.

  4. Grease a baking sheet and place the fish on it.

  5. Dredge the fish with flour, salt, and pepper.

  6. Add pieces of fat pork to the pan.

Bake and baste

  1. Baste the fish every ten minutes.

  2. Cook for fifteen minutes per pound, plus an additional fifteen minutes.

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

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

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Pork + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Pork and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,187 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, cooking through as the bulk of the meat.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour that melts into the fish as it bakes.
Fat pork
Adds fat to the pan, helping to baste the fish and keep it moist.
Flour
Dusted on the fish surface, it helps the exterior brown and form a light crust.

The step that matters

Baste the fish every ten minutes. Regular basting spreads melted fat and pan juices over the surface, keeping the fish moist and promoting even browning during the long 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.

More baked fish recipes

with Tomatoes 7with Breadcrumbs 6Stuffed 6in Batter 4with Pork Slices 4Sauce for 4 See all 221 →

You might also like

Fried FishFried Fish120 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipes