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To Boil a Brill

A boiled brill served with sauce and optional lobster coral garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and parsley work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 890 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

To Boil a Brill

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the brill and remove the fins.

  2. Bring a pot of water to nearly boiling.

Cook and serve

  1. Gently simmer the brill in the water: 20 minutes for moderate-sized, 30 minutes for large.

  2. Drain the brill well on a fish plate.

  3. Serve on a napkin with your choice of sauce.

  4. Optionally, sprinkle lobster coral over the fish.

  5. Garnish with curled parsley around 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. Lobster + parsleytop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together890 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Brill
The main fish, which turns firm and flaky as it cooks gently in the water.
Lobster sauce, anchovy sauce, crab sauce, or shrimp sauce
Adds savoury, briny flavour to the mild, plain boiled fish.

The step that matters

Gently simmer the brill. If the water boils hard, the delicate flesh can break apart and toughen. 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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