Skip to main content
Main

Broiled Sea Bream a LA Maitre d’Hotel

Broiled sea bream marinated in oil, salt, onion, parsley, and pepper, then grilled and served with maitre‑d’hôtel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Broiled Sea Bream a LA Maitre d’Hotel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the fish, trim the fins and tail tips, and remove the gills and scales.

  2. Dip the fish quickly in cold water, wipe it dry, and score it slightly.

Marinate and broil

  1. Steep the fish for 30 minutes in salad oil, salt, onion, parsley, and pepper.

  2. Remove the fish from the marinade, drain well, and place it on a grill.

  3. Cook the fish for about 5 minutes, turning to cook both sides.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot dish with maitre‑d'hôtel 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Sea bream
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole and firm once heated through.
Salad oil
Carries the marinade flavours and keeps the fish moist while it cooks on the grill.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma to the marinade that penetrates the flesh during the steep.
Parsley
Contributes a fresh herbal aroma to the marinade.

The step that matters

Drain the fish well before grilling. Excess marinade on the surface drips and flares or steams on the grill, so the skin chars unevenly instead of browning. Draining well lets the surface dry and brown cleanly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes