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Stuffed Smelts

A fish dish where smelts are stuffed with a butter, onion, bread, parsley, and egg mixture and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Stuffed Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the smelts

  1. Clean and open the smelts, season them, and let them sit for two hours.

Make the stuffing

  1. Melt the butter.

  2. Grate a little onion into the butter while it is hot.

  3. Stir in some raw chopped fish and cook the mixture until done.

  4. Add soaked and squeezed bread.

  5. Remove from heat and mix in seasoning and the egg.

Stuff and bake

  1. Stuff each fish with the mixture and fasten each fish with a toothpick.

  2. Dip each fish in cream, then in flour.

  3. Place the fish in a well-buttered pan and top the fish with flakes of butter.

  4. Bake.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Eggs
Binds the stuffing so it holds together inside the fish.
Bread
Soaked and squeezed, it adds moisture and body to the stuffing.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the fish brown in the pan.
Onion
Adds aroma and savory flavor to the stuffing when grated into hot butter.

The step that matters

Cook the stuffing until done before removing from heat. The raw chopped fish must be fully cooked before the egg is mixed in, because the egg is not heated enough to cook the fish afterward and raw fish could remain unsafe and unevenly textured inside the smelts.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (smelt, parsley, butter, bread, sauce, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Horseradishfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against smelt, parsley, butter, bread, sauce, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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