Skip to main content
Main

Baked Fish

A whole fish seasoned, stuffed, and baked with optional salt pork, then garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Fish and pork work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 668 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Rub the cleaned fish with coarse sea salt and fill it with stuffing, then sew the edges together.

  2. Cut gashes on each side of the fish and insert strips of salt pork if using a lean fish.

  3. Wrap the tail in greased paper and grease a baking sheet.

  4. Skewer the fish in the shape of an 'S' and place it on the greased sheet with pieces of pork fat.

Bake and serve

  1. Dredge the fish with flour and baste every ten minutes.

  2. Bake for about 10 minutes per pound plus an additional 10 minutes.

  3. The fish is done when the flesh separates from the bone.

  4. Garnish with parsley and serve with drawn butter or fish sauce.

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. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

Whole fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into flaky, tender flesh.
Pork fat
Adds moisture and richness as it melts over and under the fish during baking.
Flour
Dredged on the surface, it helps the skin brown and form a light crust.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to a lean fish when inserted into its flesh.

The step that matters

Judging doneness. Fish cooks quickly and becomes dry once overcooked. Checking that the flesh separates easily from the bone, rather than relying only on the timed estimate, helps keep it moist.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, pork, flour, 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.

More baked fish recipes

with Tomatoes 7with Breadcrumbs 6Stuffed 6in Batter 4with Pork Slices 4Sauce for 4 See all 221 →

You might also like

Fried FishFried Fish120 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipes