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How to Roast and Bake Fish

Roasted and baked whole fish served with a gravy made from its heads and tails, flavored with lemon pickle, ketchup, anchovy, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

How to Roast and Bake Fish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the gills from the fish.

  2. Fill the belly with forcemeat pudding and sew the fish up.

  3. Dredge the fish with flour.

  4. Lard the fish with butter or fat bacon.

  5. Place the fish in a baking dish.

  6. Make gravy or broth using the heads and tails of the fish.

  7. Pour the gravy into the dish.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake the fish in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until done.

  2. Once cooked, pour off the gravy, skim off the fat, and strain it through a sieve.

  3. Add lemon pickle, ketchup, anchovy, and lemon slice to the gravy and boil for a few minutes.

  4. Thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour.

Serve

  1. Pour the thickened gravy over the fish in a clean dish.

  2. Garnish with sliced lemon and fried parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Ketchup + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter or fat bacon
Coats the fish to add richness and moisture during baking.
Flour
Dredges the fish and thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce.
Anchovy
Adds a savory, salty depth to the gravy.
Lemon pickle
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the gravy.

The step that matters

Skimming and straining the gravy before thickening. Fat left in the gravy can make the sauce greasy and split it when thickened, while straining removes bits so the sauce stays smooth.

“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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