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Fried Fish

Fried fish with salt pork and optional egg and crumbs, served hot with beurre noir and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Fried Fish

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fried Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Clean, wash, and drain the fish.

  2. Salt the fish and roll them in a mixture of flour and cornmeal.

  3. In a pan, fry the salt pork until crisp and brown, then remove it.

  4. Add enough fish to cover the bottom of the pan and fry until brown on one side.

  5. Turn the fish and fry the other side until brown.

  6. Serve the fish on a hot dish, garnished with the fried salt pork.

  7. Season fish with salt and pepper.

  8. Dip the fish in beaten egg.

  9. Roll the fish in crumbs.

  10. Fry the fish in hot fat.

  11. Serve very hot, optionally with beurre noir poured over and garnished with parsley.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Small fish
The main food; its flesh cooks through quickly and flakes when fried.
Flour
Forms a thin coating that browns and helps the fish keep its moisture.
Cornmeal
Adds a crisp, golden crust to the outside of the fish.
Salt pork
Renders fat for frying and adds savory, smoky flavor.
Egg
Binds the crumbs to the fish so the coating holds during frying.
Butter
Browned into beurre noir, it adds a nutty, toasted flavor.

The step that matters

Fry the fish in hot fat. Hot fat browns and crisps the coating quickly, so the fish absorbs less grease. Adding too many pieces at once cools the fat and leaves the coating soggy.

“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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