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Steamed Fish

Steamed fish is cooked by steaming filleted fish with butter, pepper, salt, and buttered paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Steamed Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the fish on a buttered plate.

  2. Sprinkle with pepper and coarse sea salt, then cover with a piece of buttered paper.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam over a saucepan of boiling water for about 15 minutes.

  2. When the fish looks white and milky, it is done.

  3. Serve plain or pour white sauce over.

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

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

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

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

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Forms the flaky, delicate main body of the dish that cooks through gently with steam.
Butter
Adds richness and keeps the fish moist while it steams on the plate.

The step that matters

Judging doneness by colour. Fish turns opaque white and milky as its proteins set. Overcooking squeezes out moisture and leaves it dry and tough, so check it at the stated time and look for that change.

“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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