Skip to main content
Main

To Boil a Turbot

A boiled turbot served with fried oysters or shrimp sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turbot and anchovy match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 110 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

To Boil a Turbot

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the Turbot very clean without soaking it in water.

  2. Rub the fish with coarse sea salt and place it white side up on a fish plate, covering it with a cloth.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the fish in a kettle with cold water, add a handful of salt and vinegar, and boil gradually.

  2. Once cooked, carefully remove the fish, drain it, and slip it onto a serving dish.

  3. Garnish with fried oysters or shrimp sauce.

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. Turbot + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Vinegar + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity to the cooking water, which helps keep the fish flesh firm.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the fish and draws out surface moisture before cooking.

The step that matters

Boil gradually. Bringing the water up to a boil slowly and holding it there gently cooks the fish evenly. Hard, rapid boiling can break the delicate flesh apart.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turbot, vinegar, flour, white wine, anchovy, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turbot, vinegar, flour, white wine, anchovy, nutmeg, butter. 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.

More boiled turbot recipes

with Lobster Sauce 4Plain 3 See all 114 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes