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Broiled Bluefish

Broiled bluefish served with beurre noir sauce and garnished with parsley and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Broiled Bluefish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Preheat the broiler.

  2. Grease the broiler well with butter.

  3. Place the fish inside, down next to the fire first.

  4. Turn the fish.

  5. Once nicely browned, transfer the fish to a buttered baking sheet.

  6. Bake in the oven for a few minutes, about 20 to 30 minutes depending on the size.

  7. Garnish the fish with parsley and lemon slices.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Heat 2 tablespoons of butter in a frying pan until very hot.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of vinegar, 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon of lemon juice, ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt, and ¼ teaspoon of black pepper.

  3. Boil the sauce briefly.

  4. Pour the sauce over the fish before serving.

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

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bluefish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a flaky texture under heat.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the fish brown during broiling and gives the sauce its fat base.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity to the sauce that balances the richness of the butter.
Lemon juice
Brightens the sauce with acidity and a fresh citrus aroma.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce briefly. Heating the butter until very hot and then boiling the sauce only briefly lets the sharp vinegar and lemon flavors mellow while the butter stays emulsified. Boiling too long can reduce the sauce too far and make it greasy or harsh.

“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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