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Baked Fish

A whole fish is seasoned, stuffed, wrapped, and baked with fat pork, then garnished with parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Prepare the fish for cooking and sprinkle the inside with coarse sea salt.

  2. Fill the fish with fish dressing and sew the edges together.

  3. Skewer the fish into shape and wrap the tail in greased paper.

Bake

  1. Place the fish in a greased baking pan or on a fish sheet in the pan.

  2. Lay strips of fat salt pork over the top of the fish and hold in place with toothpicks.

  3. Dredge the fish with flour and place pieces of fat pork around it in the pan.

  4. Bake for about 10 minutes per pound, plus an additional 10 minutes; baste every 10 minutes with the fat in the pan.

Serve

  1. Carefully lift out the fish, remove the skewers and paper.

  2. Garnish with parsley and lemon, and serve with Tomato or Hollandaise Sauce.

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. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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, cooking gently to become moist and flaky.
Fat salt pork
Bastes the fish with rendered fat, adding moisture and savory flavor as it cooks.
Flour
Dusted on the fish, it helps the surface brown and form a light crust.
Fish dressing
Stuffing that adds bulk and flavor inside the fish while it bakes.

The step that matters

Basting during baking. Regular basting with the pan fat keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly. Skipping it can dry the thin outer flesh before the thicker center is cooked through.

“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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