Name: Baked Fish
Ingredients: fish; coarse sea salt; sliced lemon; curled lettuce; parsley; watercress; celery tops; hard-boiled eggs; fennel

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Season the fish with coarse sea salt.
Arrange the fish on a platter.
Garnish with sliced lemon and sprigs of curled lettuce, parsley, or watercress.
Add clusters of hard-boiled eggs and bits of fennel around the fish.
Serve immediately.

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.

Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + fenneltop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together625 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + fenneltop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together723 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, lemon, lettuce, parsley, watercress, egg, fennel):

Tarragonfits better
Capersfits better
Dillfits better
Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, lemon, lettuce, parsley, watercress, egg, fennel. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.