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Baked Fish

A fish baked in boiling water, dredged with salt and flour, served with a cream sauce made from milk and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,432 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and bake the fish

  1. Wash and dry the fish.

  2. Fold the fish and place it in a dripping pan with boiling water.

  3. Cook slowly until tender.

  4. Dredge the fish with salt and flour as it begins to bake.

Make the cream sauce

  1. For the cream sauce, heat the milk to boiling.

  2. Stir in 1 tablespoon of flour mixed with a little cold milk.

  3. Season and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

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 + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Fish + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Thickens the cream sauce and forms a light coating on the fish that helps it brown.
Rich milk
Forms the base of the cream sauce, giving it body and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the cream sauce while it cooks. Flour mixed into hot milk can clump if it is not stirred constantly. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly as it cooks.

“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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