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Baked Haddock

A haddock fillet baked with butter, flour, pepper, salt, capers, and a forcemeat stuffing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baked Haddock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the haddock thoroughly and fill it with forcemeat, sewing it securely.

Bake

  1. Dredge the fish with flour and pour warmed butter over it.

  2. Sprinkle with pepper and salt, then place in a Dutch oven before the fire.

  3. Baste the fish occasionally with warmed butter and capers.

  4. Dredge with flour two or three times while baking until it is a rich dark brown.

  5. The basting will create enough sauce to serve with the fish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Haddock + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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

Haddock
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into flaky, tender flesh.
Butter
Carries heat to the fish and helps the surface brown richly while basting.
Flour
Dredged on the surface, it helps build a dark, browned crust.
Anchovies
Adds savoury depth to the forcemeat stuffing.

The step that matters

Dredging with flour during baking. Flour applied several times builds a crust that browns deeply; adding it too early or too late can leave the surface pale or pasty, so timing matters.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Parsleyfits about as well
  2. Capersthe original
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, flour, butter, pepper, veal. 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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