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Baked Pike

Baked Pike is a whole fish baked with salt, water, eggs, breadcrumbs, butter, and served with peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 Pike

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scale and clean the Pike, then cut off the head, tail, and fins.

  2. Lay the fish skin side up in a deep baking pan with a little coarse sea salt and ½ cup water.

  3. Bake for 10 minutes, basting once with the water in the pan.

  4. Remove the skin from the fish and drain the water from the pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Roll the fish in beaten eggs and breadcrumbs, then place it back in the pan with 2 tablespoons of butter.

  2. Bake for 20 minutes, basting continually with the butter until well browned.

  3. Serve the cooked fish on a hot dish with a border of green peas.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Parmesan cheese + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,322 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Pike
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in water first to stay moist.
Eggs
Bind the breadcrumb coating so it adheres to the fish during baking.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that helps the fish brown in the oven.
Butter
Carries heat and fat across the surface, promoting browning and a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Basting with butter until well browned. Butter adds fat that helps the breadcrumb coating brown evenly. Continual basting keeps the surface from drying, so the coating browns without the fish overcooking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, cream, parmesan cheese, lemon, pepper):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, cream, parmesan cheese, lemon, 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.

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