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Baked Haddock or Whiting and Black Butter

A baked haddock or whiting stuffed with oatmeal and eggs, served with a black butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Haddock or Whiting and Black Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Prepare the stuffing by mixing oatmeal, chopped hard-boiled eggs, butter, herbs, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  2. Wash the fish in salted water and dry it thoroughly.

  3. Stuff the fish with the prepared mixture and place it in a greased baking tin.

Bake the haddock

  1. Baste the fish regularly and bake for 1 hour.

Make the black butter

  1. For the black butter, heat the fresh butter until almost black.

  2. Gradually sprinkle in the flour, stirring until it is brown.

  3. Slowly add cold water and stir continuously.

  4. Add lemon juice and serve the sauce hot with the fish.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + haddocktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together764 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Haddock or whiting
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking gently inside its stuffing and baking tin.
Oatmeal
Absorbs moisture and binds the stuffing so it stays moist during baking.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and richness to the stuffing as they bind with the butter and oats.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the stuffing, and browns in the black butter sauce.
Flour
Thickens the black butter sauce as it cooks and toasts in the hot fat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the stuffing and the finished black butter sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the butter for the black butter. Butter solids darken quickly once the fat gets very hot, so it can pass from nutty brown to burnt in seconds. Watch it closely and stop heating as soon as it turns dark.

“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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