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To Cook Smelts

Fried smelt fish seasoned with salt, pepper, and cornmeal, served with tartare sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Smelt and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Cook Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, wash, and dry the smelts.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  3. Dip in fine granulated cornmeal or flour.

  4. Fasten the smelts together with a toothpick to form a ring, or fry them without fastening.

Fry

  1. Place in a frying basket and dip in smoking hot fat, cooking for one minute.

  2. Alternatively, fry half a dozen slices of salt pork in a frying pan.

  3. Cook the smelts in the pork fat, first on one side and then the other, until browned.

Serve

  1. Serve with tartare 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. Smelt + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together103 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Smelt + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
Provide the delicate fish that cooks quickly to a crisp, tender texture.
Fine granulated cornmeal or flour
Forms a dry coating that browns and crisps in the hot fat.
Salt pork
Its rendered fat cooks the smelts and adds savory flavor and browning.

The step that matters

Frying in smoking hot fat. If the fat is not hot enough, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisp. Smoking hot fat seals the coating quickly so the fish cooks through before it becomes oily or dry.

“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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