Name: To Boil Fish
Ingredients: 1 small onion; cold water; coarse sea salt; a little vinegar

Why it works: Onion and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,226 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

To Boil Fish

Ingredients

1 small onion
cold water
coarse sea salt
a little vinegar

Directions

Place the small onion inside the fish and tie it up in a towel.
Cover the fish with cold water, salt, and a little vinegar.
Heat the water to the boiling point.
Boil the fish for 2 to 3 minutes for the largest fish.

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.

Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,226 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion: Sits inside the fish and adds a mild aroma to the cooking water and flesh.
Vinegar: Adds a slight acidity to the cooking water, brightening the flavour of the fish.

“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.