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Steamed Whiting

A simple steamed fish dish using whiting or haddock fillets, lemon, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Steamed Whiting

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a plate and lay the fish fillets on it.

  2. Sprinkle the fillets with lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

  3. Cover with another buttered plate.

Steam

  1. Place the stacked plates on top of a saucepan with boiling water.

  2. Steam for 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the thickness of 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  3. Whiting + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together510 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Whiting + lemontop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together238 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

Whiting or haddock
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking gently to flaky tenderness in the steam.
Butter
Adds richness and helps keep the fish moist and prevents it sticking to the plate.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mild fish.

The step that matters

Covering the fish with the second buttered plate. Trapping the steam around the fillets cooks them evenly and keeps them moist, so the cover should seal well over the fish.

“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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