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Baking Fish

A baked fish seasoned with herbs, butter, spices, and served with shrimp, oysters, and a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 24 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Baking Fish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Grease a baking dish with butter.

  2. Place the cleaned fish in the dish and add sweet herbs, onion, mace, pepper, bruised nutmeg, lemon peel, horseradish, and water.

  3. Dust the fish's head with flour, grate nutmeg over it, add pieces of butter, and sprinkle breadcrumbs.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until done.

  2. Remove the head and place it in a serving dish over boiling water to keep warm.

  3. Pour the cooking liquid into a saucepan and boil for 3-4 minutes.

  4. Strain the liquid and add red wine, catnip, shrimp, oysters, mushroom pickle, and butter rolled in flour.

  5. Stir and boil until thick, then strain and pour over the fish.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried toast around the fish and garnish with parsley, lemon, and horseradish.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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 is cooked gently in the baking liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and the flour-rolled butter thickens the sauce.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crust on top that helps keep the fish moist while it bakes.
Shrimp
Adds savory seafood flavor and texture to the sauce.
Oysters
Add briny seafood flavor and softness to the sauce.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Butter rolled in flour must be stirred into simmering liquid and boiled until thick. Flour needs heat to swell and set, so stopping early leaves the sauce thin and pasty-tasting.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, onion, clove, mace, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, onion, clove, mace, nutmeg, lemon. 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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