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Fish Shape

A steamed haddock cake made with egg whites, seasoned with salt and pepper, served with white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Haddock and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fish Shape

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Skin the haddock and remove the bones.

  2. Divide the fish into flakes and mix with the unbeaten egg whites.

Steam and season

  1. Place the mixture in a bowl or mold and steam for 30 minutes.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with white sauce.

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. Haddock + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pepper + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Haddock + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together492 recipes
  4. Haddock + peppertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together696 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Pepper and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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

Haddock
Provides the flaky protein that forms the body of the fish cakes.
Egg whites
Bind the flakes together and set on steaming to hold the cake's shape.

The step that matters

Steam for 30 minutes. Egg white proteins set with gentle heat. Steaming steadily and not overcooking keeps the cakes moist and tender rather than firm and rubbery.

“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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