Name: Fillets of Brill and Dutch Sauce
Ingredients: Brill fish; Dutch Sauce (see recipe No. 29)

Why it works: Fish and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,487 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fillets of Brill and Dutch Sauce

Ingredients

Brill fish
Dutch Sauce (see recipe No. 29)

Directions

Prepare the fish

Trim the meat from the fins with a sharp knife.
Split the fish down the center of the backbone.
Cut into neat fillets from the backbone to the fin on each side.

Cook and serve

Boil the fillets for about 10 minutes.
Drain the fillets and serve in an entree dish.
Pour half a pint of Dutch Sauce over each dish.

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.

Fish + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,487 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Brill fish: Forms the main body of the dish, providing firm, flaky fillets once cooked.
Dutch sauce: Adds richness and moisture, coating the fillets when poured over them.

“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.