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To Boil a Brill

Boiled brill served with lobster, anchovy, crab or shrimp sauce and optional lobster coral garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and parsley work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 890 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

To Boil a Brill

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the brill and remove the fins.

  2. Bring a pot of water to nearly boiling.

Cook the fish

  1. Gently simmer the brill in the water: 20 minutes for moderate-sized, 30 minutes for large.

  2. Watch the fish closely; do not let it remain in the water after it begins to crack.

Serve

  1. Drain the brill well and place it on a serving plate.

  2. Garnish with curled parsley and sprinkle with lobster coral if desired.

  3. Serve with your choice of sauce.

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. Lobster + parsleytop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together890 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Brill
The main fish; its firm, flaky flesh is what the cook is preparing and serving whole.
Lobster sauce, anchovy sauce, crab sauce, or shrimp sauce
Adds savoury, seafood-rich flavour that complements the mild, delicate fish at the table.

The step that matters

Stop cooking when the fish begins to crack. Gentle simmering cooks the fish through, but continued cooking past that point tightens the proteins further, making the flesh dry and tough.

“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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