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Brill

A boiled Brill seasoned with lemon, salt, vinegar, and garnished with parsley and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Brill

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the Brill and cut off its fins.

  2. Rub the fish with lemon juice and salt.

Poach

  1. Place it in a fish kettle and sprinkle with salt and vinegar.

  2. Cover with water and bring to a boil.

  3. Once boiling, reduce heat and let it simmer gently for about 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Lay the fish on a napkin, white side up, and garnish with lemon slices and parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Brill
The main fish, whose firm white flesh holds together during gentle poaching.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mild fish.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after boiling. A rolling boil toughens and breaks up delicate fish flesh. Once the water boils, lowering the heat to a gentle simmer cooks the fish evenly and keeps it moist and intact.

“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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