Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
To Fry Plaice in Egg and Bread-crumbs, or Batter
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fish
Wash the plaice in cold water and dry it with a cloth.
Place the plaice on a board, remove the skin from the back, and cut off the head and tail.
Cut the fish into slices or fillets.
Coat the fish
Grate some bread-crumbs onto a piece of paper.
Beat the egg lightly in a plate.
Dip the fish slices into the egg, coating them well.
Roll the egg-coated fish in the bread-crumbs, covering them completely. Shake off any loose crumbs.
Fry and drain
Heat ½ cup of clarified dripping in a saucepan until hot.
When the dripping is hot and smoking, carefully add the fish, minimizing handling to keep the coating intact.
Fry in batches, ensuring the pieces do not touch each other.
Place a piece of white-brown paper on a plate and transfer the fried fish onto it to drain excess grease.
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.
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Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Plaice
- Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through as the fried centrepiece.
- Egg
- Acts as a binder so the breadcrumbs stick evenly to the fish.
- Bread-crumbs
- Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns and crisps in the hot fat.
- Dripping
- Conducts heat for frying, browning the coating and adding richness to the fish.
The step that matters
Adding the fish to the hot dripping. If the fat is not hot enough, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisping; overcrowding drops the fat temperature and steams the pieces. Frying in batches keeps the fat hot and the coating crisp.
“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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