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Salt Fish

Salt Fish is a dish made by seasoning cooked fish with butter, water, flour, pepper, salt, parsley, and lemon or chili vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Salt Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin and bones from the cooked fish and place it in a clean saucepan.

  2. In a separate pan, melt the butter with water and flour over low heat.

  3. Add pepper, salt, and minced parsley to the butter mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat the fish slowly in the sauce, stirring until well mixed.

  2. Just before serving, add lemon juice or chili vinegar to 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  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

Butter
Forms the rich base of the sauce and carries flavor through the fish.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a light sauce that clings to the fish.
Cooked fish
Provides the main body of the dish, gently reheated in the sauce.
Lemon juice or chili vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce when added at the end.

The step that matters

Heat the fish slowly in the sauce. Cooked fish turns dry and tough when overheated. Gentle heat warms it through while keeping its moist, flaky texture and lets the sauce thicken evenly.

“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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