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To Boil a Brill

A boiled brill served with sauce and optional 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. Add the brill and simmer gently for 20-30 minutes, depending on size.

  2. Carefully lift the brill out and drain it on a fish plate.

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

  4. Optionally, sprinkle with lobster coral and garnish with curled parsley.

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
Is the main fish, cooked whole and gently so its flesh stays moist and flakes cleanly.

The step that matters

Simmer gently rather than boil hard. A gentle simmer cooks the fish evenly and keeps the delicate flesh from breaking apart or toughening. Fish proteins set quickly at high heat, so a rolling boil can dry the outside before the centre is cooked.

“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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