Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Fish

A halibut boiled in water with vinegar, salt, and peppercorns, served with a butter‑flour‑milk sauce flavored with parsley, capers, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Roll the halibut in wet cheese cloth.

  2. Dredge the halibut lightly with flour.

  3. Add enough water to cover the fish in a kettle.

  4. Bring the water to a near boil.

  5. Place the fish on a rack in the kettle.

  6. Add vinegar, salt, and peppercorns to the kettle.

  7. Cover the kettle.

  8. Once boiling, transfer the kettle to a cooker.

  9. Cover the cooker again.

  10. At 6 o'clock, remove the fish.

  11. Discard the skin.

  12. Drain the water.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt butter.

  2. Whisk in flour and hot milk until boiling.

  3. Add parsley, capers, salt, and pepper.

  4. Stir in the chopped yolks.

Serve

  1. Pour the hot sauce over the fish.

  2. Garnish with egg whites in rings.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Halibut
Forms the main body of the dish, providing the flaky, delicate texture that the poaching sets.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the milk and butter into a stable white sauce by gelatinizing its starch.
Hot milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to a boil.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and the mild flavor of the fish.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks enrich the sauce and whites add a mild, firm contrast as garnish.

The step that matters

Bring the water to a near boil before placing the fish. Poaching fish in water held just below a boil cooks it gently, so the flesh stays moist and tender rather than tightening and drying out as it would in a rolling boil.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, flour, fish, vinegar, butter, milk, capers):

  1. Tarragonfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, flour, fish, vinegar, butter, milk, capers. 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.

You might also like

Fried FishFried Fish120 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipes