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Broiled Sardines

Broiled sardines served on toasted Graham bread with butter, cayenne or paprika, sea salt, lemon juice, optional Banquet wafers and Parmesan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Sardines

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sardines

  1. Drain the oil from the sardines.

  2. Broil the sardines on both sides in a double wire broiler rubbed with a raw onion and greased.

Assemble on toast

  1. Toast and butter as many slices of Graham bread as you have sardines, then sprinkle with cayenne or paprika and coarse sea salt.

  2. Place a sardine on each slice of bread and squeeze lemon juice over the fish.

  3. Use toasted, buttered, and salted Banquet Wafers instead of bread.

  4. Cover the sardines with Parmesan cheese.

  5. Sift additional Parmesan cheese over the sardines.

Finish and serve

  1. Set the sardines in the oven for 2 minutes 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Pepper + parmesan cheesetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,322 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Bread + parmesan cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together577 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sardines
Provide the main fish, which is cooked by broiling until browned and tender.
Graham bread slices
Serve as a crisp, absorbent base that holds the fish and its juices.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the toast brown while adding flavour.
Parmesan cheese
Melts and browns over the fish, adding savoury, salty flavour.

The step that matters

Broil the sardines on both sides. Broiling needs even heat on both sides so the fish cooks through and browns without drying out. The wire broiler holds the fish steady so it does not break apart when turned.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper, parmesan cheese):

  1. Plumfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, parmesan cheese. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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