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Boiling Fish

A haddock is cleaned, soaked in saltwater, boiled, and served with optional garnishes and sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiling Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and gut the haddock, then soak it in a mixture of salt and water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the fish and place it in a fish kettle with enough cold water to cover two-thirds of it.

Cook and serve

  1. Skim off any scum that rises, then cover and boil gently for 5 to 10 minutes until cooked through. Adjust cooking time based on the weight of the fish.

  2. Serve garnished with horseradish or egg balls, and with melted butter or sauces on the side.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Haddock + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Haddock + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 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

Haddock
Provides the flaky, delicate protein that becomes the dish itself once gently cooked.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the fish during the soak and firms its flesh slightly before cooking.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat that complements the mild, lean fish when served.

The step that matters

Skim and boil gently. Boiling hard breaks the delicate fish into pieces and can make it tough. Gentle simmering cooks it evenly, and skimming removes scum that would cloud the flavour.

Swap the horseradish

The recipe marks horseradish as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, butter, egg, oyster, sauce, anchovy, ketchup):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Horseradishthe original
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Mustardfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, butter, egg, oyster, sauce, anchovy, ketchup. 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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