Skip to main content
Main

Fried Flounders

Fried flounders are coated in flour, pan‑fried, and served with a whipped sauce and egg garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Flounders

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Sprinkle the cleaned flounder with coarse sea salt and dredge well with flour.

  2. Heat hot fat in a pan and fry the flounder until brown, turning carefully to avoid breaking.

  3. After frying, remove the fish and place it on a hot dish.

  4. Remove any skewers used to hold the fish together.

Serve

  1. Pour whip sauce around the fish and scatter the grated egg yolks over it.

  2. Use the egg whites as a garnish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Flounder
Provides the main body of the dish, cooked through and browned by frying.
Flour
Dredged onto the fish to form a dry coating that browns and crisps in the hot fat.
Butter
Melted butter adds richness and flavour to the dish.
Egg yolks
Finely powdered yolks scattered over the fish add richness and a soft, creamy texture.
Egg whites
Sliced into rings, they add a light, delicate garnish with a mild texture.

The step that matters

Turning the flounder while frying. The flour coating and delicate flesh can break apart if the fish is moved roughly. Turning carefully keeps the fish intact and the coating in place while the surface browns evenly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes