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To Fry Haddocks in Sauce

A fried haddock dish cooked in a butter‑flour sauce with onions, pepper, and sea salt, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

To Fry Haddocks in Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Skin and remove the heads from the haddocks, then cut each into four pieces and wash them clean.

Make the sauce

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter and stir in the flour until browned.

  2. Add the minced onions, pepper, and salt to the browned butter.

  3. Pour in enough boiling water to nearly cover the fish pieces and let it boil.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the fish to the pan and cook until one side is done, then turn to cook the other side.

  2. Serve hot, pouring the sauce over the fish and garnishing with parsley.

  3. If preferred, omit the onions and use mushroom catsup and lemon pickle instead.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Haddock
Forms the flaky main body of the dish, cooking through as it fries in the sauce.
Butter
Provides fat for frying and, browned with flour, adds a nutty aroma to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks in the browned butter, giving it body.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma to the sauce as they cook with the butter and flour.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the butter. Flour cooked in fat must be stirred until evenly browned but not burnt, since scorched flour turns bitter and the roux thickens unevenly. Adding the boiling water too early or too fast can also cause lumps.

“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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