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Fish Pie

A lobster fish pie made with bread crumbs, lemon, cayenne, salt, eggs, fried into cutlets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fish Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Empty the tin of lobster into a bowl.

  2. Add the bread crumbs, lemon juice, lemon rind, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  3. Whisk the eggs and mix everything thoroughly with a fork until smooth.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the mixture into small cutlets or balls.

  2. Dip in flour and water batter or beaten egg and bread crumbs.

  3. Fry in clarified fat for about 7 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve on a fish napkin, garnished with parsley and lemon.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Lobster
Provides the main flavour and the flaked body of the cakes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture so the cutlets hold their shape when fried.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the mixture body so it holds together.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich seafood flavour.

The step that matters

Fry in clarified fat for about 7 minutes. Frying at a steady heat browns the coating and cooks the egg-bound centre through without drying it out. Too hot and the outside burns before the inside sets; too cool and the cutlets absorb fat and fall apart.

“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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