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Salt Fish

Salt Fish is a dish of boiled fish served in a butter and water sauce with parsley, pepper, and lemon or chili vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 the sauce

  1. Remove the skin and bones from the 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.

  3. Serve the fish in a deep dish with a border of mashed parsnips or potatoes.

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. Parsley + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

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

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

  5. Flour + parsniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, flaking into the sauce as it heats.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Lemon juice or chili vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce just before serving.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice or chili vinegar. Acid added too early and heated for long can dull its brightness and make the sauce taste flat. Adding it just before serving keeps the flavour fresh and sharp.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Parsnipthe original

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