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To Fry or Broil Fish Properly

This dish is a whole fish coated in flour or crumbs and fried or broiled in sweet lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and bread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 209 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

To Fry or Broil Fish Properly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lay the cleaned fish on a folded towel and remove all water.

  2. When dry, roll the fish in wheat flour, rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or Indian meal.

Fry

  1. In a thick-bottomed frying pan, heat plenty of sweet lard (1 tablespoon salt per pound of lard) until boiling hot.

  2. Carefully lay the fish in the hot lard and fry gently until one side is a fine, delicate brown.

  3. Turn the fish and fry the other side until done.

Serve

  1. Remove the fish carefully and serve immediately, or keep it covered with a tin cover to keep hot.

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. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Fish + wheattop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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

Whole fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through in hot fat while the coating crisps.
Wheat flour
Forms a dry coating that browns in the hot lard and helps create a crisp surface.
Sweet lard
Conducts heat to cook the fish and drives browning and crispness on the outside.

The step that matters

Drying the fish before coating. Surface water turns to steam in hot fat and makes the coating lift off or splatter. A dry surface lets the coating adhere and brown 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.

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