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To Fry Brook Trout or Any Other Small Fish

A fried fish dish using brook trout or other small fish, seasoned with pepper, salt, cornmeal, and cooked in butter and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Fry Brook Trout or Any Other Small Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the fish.

  2. Wrap the fish in a clean, dry towel and let them rest for a few minutes.

  3. Season the fish with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Roll the fish in cornmeal.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the fish in a mixture of ⅓ cup butter and ⅔ cup lard until golden brown.

  2. Drain the fish on a sieve or coarse brown paper.

  3. Serve 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. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Fish + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,948 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small fish
Provides the main protein, which cooks through quickly in hot fat.
Cornmeal
Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns and crisps during frying.
Butter
Adds rich flavor and helps the coating brown in the frying fat.
Lard
Serves as the high-temperature frying fat, giving even heat and crisping.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to crisp the cornmeal coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy before the fish cooks through. Butter can burn at high heat, so the lard helps keep the frying temperature stable.

“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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