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Baked Fish and Tomatoes

A baked dish of fish layered with sliced tomatoes, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, mace, lemon juice, topped with breadcrumbs and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Fish and Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a pie dish.

Layer and bake

  1. Layer fish and tomato slices alternately in the dish.

  2. Sprinkle pepper, coarse sea salt, nutmeg, ground mace, and lemon juice between each layer.

  3. Finish with a layer of breadcrumbs and dot with butter.

  4. Bake for 15 minutes if the fish is cooked, or 30 to 40 minutes if uncooked.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish and sets to a flaky texture as it bakes.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and acidity that keep the layers juicy as they cook.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the fish and tomatoes.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp topping that browns in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the breadcrumb topping brown.

The step that matters

Bake for the correct time. Cooked fish only needs 15 minutes, while uncooked fish needs 30 to 40 minutes. Raw fish that is underbaked may stay unsafe to eat, and cooked fish left too long becomes dry and tough.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, tomato, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, tomato, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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