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Cream Fish

Cream Fish is a baked fish dish with a milk and flour sauce topped with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Summer savory and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 263 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cream Fish

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. Boil the fish until cooked, then remove the bones.

Make the sauce

  1. Tie the summer savory and chopped onion in a thin muslin bag.

  2. Boil the milk, season with salt and pepper, and add the bag.

  3. Let the milk boil for 8 minutes, then remove the bag.

  4. Mix the flour and butter, stir into the milk, and boil for 3 minutes.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a baking dish, layer fish, sprinkle with salt, add another layer of fish, and more salt.

  2. Pour the milk mixture over the fish, cover with bread crumbs and small pieces of butter.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

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. Summer savory + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together263 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Summer savory + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Onion + summer savorytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together299 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Forms the bulk of the dish and provides the main flesh texture once cooked and flaked.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a creamy sauce that holds the fish together.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce, giving richness and a smooth body.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the sauce and helps the bread crumbs brown on top.
Bread crumbs
Form a topping that browns in the oven, adding a golden crust and texture.
White onion
Infuses the milk with mild aromatic flavor while it simmers in the muslin bag.

The step that matters

Boiling the flour and butter into the milk. Boiling the flour mixture for the full time cooks out its raw starch taste and lets the starch swell fully, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of staying pasty.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, summer savory, milk, flour, butter, pepper, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, summer savory, milk, flour, butter, pepper, bread. 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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