Name: Broiled White Fish
Ingredients: 1 medium sized white fish; coarse sea salt; melted butter

Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Broiled White Fish

Ingredients

1 medium sized white fish
coarse sea salt
melted butter

Directions

Prepare

Wash the fish thoroughly in salt water.
Spread the fish flat on a wire broiler.
Sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Cook and serve

Set the broiler in the oven and bake for 20 minutes.
Brown the fish over hot coals.
Pour melted butter over the fish and serve.

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.

Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

White fish: Forms the main body of the dish and cooks to a flaky texture.
Melted butter: Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour over the cooked fish.

“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.