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Broiled Salt Fish

Broiled salt fish is a salted fish cooked in a pan with water and flour, then thickened into a gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Broiled Salt Fish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Place a tin sheet in a baking pan and dredge it with flour.

  3. Pour about ½ cup of cold water into the pan.

Bake

  1. Baste the fish often with the water in the pan while cooking.

  2. If the water evaporates, add more, but do not start with too much.

  3. Bake the fish for one hour.

  4. Once cooked, transfer the fish to a serving dish using the tin sheet.

Make the gravy

  1. Pour the gravy from the pan into a bowl.

  2. Return the gravy to the baking pan and bring it to a boil.

  3. Thicken the gravy with 1 tablespoon of flour and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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 + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Fish + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,948 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Fish + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt fish
Is the main protein, cooked slowly so it becomes tender and well seasoned.
Flour
Dredged on the tin sheet and used to thicken the pan gravy, giving it body.
Cold water
Keeps the fish moist while baking and forms the base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Adding water to the pan. Basting with the pan liquid keeps the fish moist, and adding too much water at the start can dilute the gravy and make it harder to thicken later.

“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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