Skip to main content
Main

To Dress and Bake a Haddock

A haddock stuffed with parsley, bread crumbs, pepper, salt, and egg, baked until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Dress and Bake a Haddock

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 the fish

  1. Clean and wash the haddock thoroughly. Cut off the tail and fins, then dry the fish completely.

Stuff and shape

  1. Make a stuffing with parsley, bread crumbs, dripping, pepper, and salt, and moisten it with the egg. Stuff the mixture into the fish and sew the flaps closed.

  2. Shape the haddock into an 'S' by drawing a string through the head, middle, and tail.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the fish on a greased baking tin, brush with melted dripping, and cover with bread crumbs. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 15 to 20 minutes.

  2. Carefully lift the fish onto a hot dish, remove the string, and serve with dry toast and fresh 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Haddock
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into flaky, tender flesh when baked.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together rather than falling apart during baking.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture in the stuffing and form a crisp, browned coating on top.
Dripping
Adds fat for richness and helps the crumb topping brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Dry the fish completely. Surface moisture dilutes the seasoning and makes the crumb coating soggy instead of crisp. Drying the fish before stuffing and baking helps the topping brown and keeps the stuffing from becoming watery.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes