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Steamed Halibut

A halibut steamed in boiling water, served with a drawn butter sauce and sliced hard‑boiled egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Halibut

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the halibut by wiping it with a cheese cloth dampened with cold water.

  2. Place the halibut in a strainer over a kettle of boiling water, cover closely, and keep the water boiling until the fish is done.

  3. The fish is cooked when the flesh separates from the bone.

Make the sauce

  1. To make the sauce, melt ¾ tablespoon of butter, add ¾ tablespoon of flour, and mix well.

  2. Gradually pour in ½ cup of boiling water while stirring constantly.

  3. Season with salt, then add ¾ tablespoon of butter in small pieces and the sliced hard boiled egg.

Serve

  1. Transfer the fish to a hot serving dish, remove the skin, and pour around Drawn Butter 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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, cooked gently by steam until the flesh separates from the bone.
Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux and later added in pieces to enrich the sauce with fat and flavour.
Flour
Mixed with melted butter to form a roux that thickens the boiling water into a smooth sauce.
Hard boiled egg
Sliced into the finished sauce, adding soft texture and mild richness.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling under the strainer. Steam from a steady boil cooks the fish evenly and gently. If the water drops, the fish cooks slowly and unevenly, and the flesh may not separate cleanly from the bone.

“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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