Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Bass

A bass fillet cooked by boiling, then finished with browned butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Bass

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Wrap the bass in a clean white cloth.

  2. Place it in a pot with enough cold water to cover it well.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat.

Finish and serve

  1. Take out all the bones.

  2. Place the fish in a pan.

  3. Pour browned butter over it.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. Put the pan in the oven to brown.

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. 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

Bass
Main protein; gentle poaching firms the flesh so it flakes cleanly.
Browned butter
Adds fat, richness and a nutty aroma to the mild fish.

The step that matters

Boil for 30 minutes. Fish proteins tighten as they heat, so prolonged boiling makes the flesh dry and tough. Removing the pot from heat once the time is up keeps it moist.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes