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Red Mullet Baked

A baked red mullet served with a butter‑flour sauce seasoned with salt, cayenne, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Red Mullet Baked

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the fish as you would grey mullet.

  2. Score the fish.

  3. Fold the fish in buttered or oiled parchment paper.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for about fifteen minutes.

  2. Pour the cooking liquid into a saucepan.

  3. Add 1 ounce of butter.

  4. Thicken the sauce with flour.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt, a pinch of cayenne, and chopped parsley.

  6. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve in a tureen.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Red mullet
Is the main fish, cooked gently in its parchment to stay moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce and carries flavour.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil. Flour needs to be heated fully to thicken properly and lose its raw, pasty taste. Boiling activates the starch so the sauce sets smooth rather than floury or lumpy.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Sagefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper. 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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