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Baked Cod, Black Fish, Haddock, Etc

A baked fish dish where bread is stuffed inside the fish, topped with salt pork, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Baked Cod, Black Fish, Haddock, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Spread slices of bread with butter, then season with salt and pepper.

  2. Stuff the seasoned bread inside the fish and sew it up with a needle and thread.

  3. Skewer the fish through the lip and tail, securing them with twine.

Bake and baste

  1. Place the fish in a serving dish, top with slices of salt pork, sprinkle with salt, and dust with flour.

  2. Baste the fish several times with the cooking juices.

  3. Bake for 1 hour.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, cooking into flaky, moist flesh.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the bread stuffing as it melts.
Salt pork
Renders fat over the fish, adding savoriness and moisture as it bastes the surface.
Flour
Dusted on the surface, it helps the exterior brown and thicken the cooking juices.

The step that matters

Baste the fish several times with the cooking juices.. Spooning juices over the fish during baking keeps the surface from drying out, since lean fish cooks quickly and can turn dry and tough.

“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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