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To Bake Smelts

Baked smelts seasoned with salt, pepper, and breadcrumbs, topped with butter, and garnished with fried parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Bake Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the smelts thoroughly with a cloth.

  2. Arrange the smelts in a buttered flat baking dish.

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

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the fish with bread or cracker crumbs.

  2. Place a piece of butter on top of each smelt.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes.

  4. Garnish with fried parsley and cut lemon before serving.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
Small whole fish that form the main body of the dish and cook quickly and tender.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the fish and crumbs brown as they bake.
Bread crumbs or cracker crumbs
Form a crisp topping that browns in the oven and helps hold moisture in the fish.

The step that matters

Baking the smelts. Smelts are very thin and cook fast, so overbaking dries them out. Watching the time within the stated range keeps the flesh moist while the crumbs brown.

“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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