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American White-bait

Fried small fish served with buttered brown bread and lemon.

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 ↓

American White-bait

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the fish and dry them on a clean towel.

  2. Place the fish in a sieve with a little flour, coarse sea salt, and cayenne pepper. Shake to coat the fish.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a frying kettle half full of fat until it begins to smoke.

  2. Carefully add the fish to the hot fat and fry for 30 seconds.

  3. Remove the fish with a skimmer and serve immediately with thinly sliced, buttered brown bread and lemon.

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. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Small fish
Forms the crisp-coated, tender main component that is fried whole.
Flour
Coats the fish so the surface dries and fries to a light, crisp crust.
Fat for frying
Transfers heat quickly to cook the coated fish and crisp its outside.

The step that matters

Heating the fat until it begins to smoke. The fat must be very hot before the fish goes in. Hot fat sets the flour coating quickly, so the fish crisps rather than absorbing grease and turning soggy. Fat that is too cool produces greasy, heavy results.

“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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