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Baked Hake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Hake

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the fish with vinegar and let it sit for 1 hour.

  2. Roll the fish in a cloth and let it dry.

  3. Sift stale bread through a wire sieve into a bowl.

  4. Mix the bread crumbs with pepper, salt, nutmeg, mixed herbs, and lemon rind.

  5. Brush the fish with beaten egg and sprinkle half the crumb mixture over it.

  6. Place the fish in a deep baking dish on a drainer.

  7. Pour water and vinegar around the fish, not over it.

  8. Add minced shallot and sliced carrot (or onions and potatoes) around 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, egg, vinegar, shallot):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, egg, vinegar, shallot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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