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How to Broil Fish

Broiled fish prepared by cleaning, seasoning, and cooking in a broiler, served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

How to Broil Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wipe the fish with a cloth to clean it without removing scales.

  2. Open the fish, remove the insides, and wipe the body with a cloth.

  3. Separate the liver from the intestines and place the liver back inside the fish.

  4. Wrap the fish in white paper.

Season and broil

  1. Season the fish's sides and tongues with cayenne, black pepper, and a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Flour the fish's sides and tongues well and broil them whole.

  3. Broil the fish until cooked through, similar to how you would broil surmullet.

Serve

  1. Serve the broiled fish with melted butter.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Forms a light coating on the skin that helps it brown and crisp under the broiler.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture to the fish when served.

The step that matters

Broil the fish until cooked through. Fish cooks quickly and dries out easily under high heat, so the cook must watch closely and stop once the flesh is opaque and flakes at the thickest point.

“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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