Skip to main content
Main

French Method of Serving Fried Fish

A fried fish dish served with butter and finely chopped herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

French Method of Serving Fried Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the fish

  1. Heat the dripping until boiling hot.

  2. Dry and flour the fish before frying.

  3. Fry the fish in the hot dripping until done.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish on a hot dish with a small bit of butter underneath.

  2. Scatter finely-chopped herbs over the fish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Fish + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Flour
Forms a light coating that helps the fish brown and crisp in the hot fat.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, savoury flavour to the finished fish.
Fish
The main protein, cooked through in hot fat until done.

The step that matters

Dry the fish before flouring. Surface moisture turns to steam in hot fat and keeps the coating from browning and crisping well. Patting the fish dry lets the flour adhere and the surface fry rather than steam.

“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

Fried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipesBroiled FishBroiled Fish68 recipes