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Baked Fish

A whole fish baked with butter, catsup, pungent sauce, lemon, and served with a sauce and garnishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Baked Fish

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare and bake

  1. Prepare the fish as you would for boiling and place it on a wire gridiron.

  2. Set the gridiron on a dripping pan with a little hot water and bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 30 minutes for small fish or 1 hour for large fish.

  3. When nearly done, butter the top of the fish and brown it nicely.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, combine the dripping pan gravy with catsup, pungent sauce, and lemon juice.

  2. Thicken the sauce with browned flour mixed with cold water.

  3. Garnish the dish with parsley sprigs and currant jelly.

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

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

  2. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 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

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently on a gridiron above hot water.
Butter
Enriches the surface and helps the top brown nicely in the oven.
Browned flour
Thickens the pan gravy into a sauce with body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Timing the bake by fish size. Fish turns dry and tough when overcooked, so the bake time must match the fish's size, and the fish should be checked as it nears done before the top is browned.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, sauce, lemon, flour, parsley):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, sauce, lemon, flour, parsley. 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.

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