Skip to main content
Main

Fried Pickerel

Fried pickerel is a dish of fish fried with salt pork and Indian meal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pork and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,121 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Fried Pickerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the salt pork into very thin pieces.

  2. Clean the fish by washing it in cold water.

  3. If the fish is large, cut it into pieces about 3 to 4 inches square.

  4. Dry the fish with a towel.

  5. Season the Indian meal with salt and pepper, then roll the fish in it.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the pork in a frying pan until light brown.

  2. Remove the browned pork from the pan and add the fish to the drippings.

  3. Fry the fish until brown on both sides.

  4. Serve the fried fish and pork together in a dish.

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. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Salt pork
Renders fat into the pan, giving the fish flavour and a golden, savoury coating of drippings.
Pickerel
Lean fish that becomes flaky and tender when fried, forming the main body of the dish.
Indian meal
Cornmeal coating that dries on contact with hot fat, creating a crisp, browned crust around the fish.

The step that matters

Fry the fish until brown on both sides. The fish is coated in meal and must be fried in hot drippings long enough to form a crisp crust before it is turned and browned. Frying too gently makes the coating soak up fat and turn soggy, while overcooking dries the flesh.

“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.

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes