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To Bake Fish

A fish baked with buttered bread stuffing and pork slices, seasoned with salt, pepper, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Bake Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Spread butter on small pieces of bread and season with salt and pepper.

Stuff and dress the fish

  1. Stuff the bread inside the fish and sew it up with a needle and thread.

  2. Place the fish in a dish and top with thin slices of pork.

  3. Sprinkle the fish with salt and dust it with flour.

Bake

  1. Baste the fish with the juices that cook out of it.

  2. Bake for 1 hour.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the cooked flesh that is served.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread stuffing, carrying flavor and keeping it moist.
Pork
Lays over the fish and melts fat that bastes the flesh and adds savory flavor.
Flour
Dusted on the fish surface, it helps the exterior brown and thicken the cooking juices.

The step that matters

Basting with the cooking juices. Spooning the juices back over the fish keeps the surface moist during a long bake, while the juices also add flavor and help build a browned exterior.

“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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