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To Bake a Haddock

A haddock stuffed with parsley, herbs, bread crumbs, and butter, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Bake a Haddock

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the haddock and scrape off the scales.

  2. Stuff the fish with parsley, herbs, bread crumbs, and butter, and season to taste. Sew up the fish.

Coat and bake

  1. Rub the outside with melted butter or dripping. Roll the fish in bread crumbs.

  2. Place on a greased baking tray and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 45 minutes.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Haddock + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together764 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Haddock + parsleytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Haddock
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into flaky, tender flesh.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust on the outside and add body to the stuffing.
Butter
Adds moisture and richness, and helps the crumb coating brown.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma and a light herbal flavour to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Rolling and sewing the stuffed fish. Stuffing must stay enclosed during baking. If the fish is not sewn closed securely, the filling can leak out and dry. The crumb coating also needs an even layer of melted fat to brown properly.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, bread, butter):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Garlicfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, bread, butter. 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.

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