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Fish Tubjbot

A baked fish casserole made with milk, onion, butter, flour, eggs, and topped with crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fish Tubjbot

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.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk with the chopped onion until well flavored.

  2. In a separate pan, melt the butter, then add the flour and stir until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the boiling milk mixture to the butter and flour, stirring continuously.

  4. Before removing from heat, stir in the beaten eggs until well combined.

Assemble and bake

  1. Let the mixture cool, then layer it with the fish in a baking dish.

  2. Top with rolled crackers and pieces of butter.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Codfish
Forms the main body of the casserole as the flaked fish layer.
Milk
Makes the liquid base of the sauce that carries the fish and sets as it bakes.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavor, and browns the crackers on top.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, stable sauce.
Eggs
Bind the sauce and help it set firm when baked.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs before removing from heat. If the eggs go into a sauce that is too hot, they can scramble into lumps. Stirring them in just before taking the pan off the heat, while stirring constantly, helps them blend smoothly and thicken the sauce gently.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, egg. 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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