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Smelts with Tartare Sauce

Smelts fried in hot fat, served with tartar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Smelts with Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Fry

  1. Place as many smelts as will cover the bottom of a frying basket into the hot fat.

  2. Fry for one minute until golden brown.

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

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

Serve

  1. Serve with tartar 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. Pork + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Smelt + porktop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
Small whole fish that form the main dish, cooking quickly in hot fat to a golden crust.
Salt pork
Renders fat into the pan, giving the smelts a rich, savory flavor when used for frying.

The step that matters

Frying in smoking hot fat. The fat must be very hot before the smelts go in. Hot fat seals the surface quickly, so the fish browns and crisps without absorbing much grease or overcooking inside.

“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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