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Baked Haddock

A stuffed haddock baked with veal, ham, breadcrumbs, butter, egg batter, and served with mussel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Baked Haddock

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the fish by gutting and trimming it carefully.

  2. Prepare a stuffing with veal, ham, and bread crumbs, and fill the fish.

  3. Sew the fish closed with strong thread, shaping it round by placing its tail in its mouth.

Coat and bake

  1. Rub the fish with plenty of butter.

  2. Mix eggs and flour to create a batter, then coat the fish with it.

  3. Sprinkle additional bread crumbs over the fish.

  4. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and bake the fish for about 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish on the baking tin or a platter, with mussel sauce as an accompaniment.

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. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind with flour into a batter that coats the fish and helps the crumbs adhere.
Flour
Thickens the egg mixture into a batter that holds the crumb coating in place.
Bread crumbs
Form the stuffing and the outer crumb coating that gives the baked fish a crisp, browned surface.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the skin and helps it brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Sew the fish closed. The stuffing must stay inside during baking. Thread that is strong and tight, with the tail placed in the mouth to shape the fish round, keeps the filling from spilling out as the fish cooks.

“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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