Skip to main content
Main

To Fry or Broil Fish Properly

A whole fish is coated in flour and fried or broiled in sweet lard until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Fish and wheat work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 37 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

To Fry or Broil Fish Properly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lay the cleaned fish on a folded towel and dry it thoroughly.

  2. Roll the fish in wheat flour or your preferred coating.

Fry

  1. Heat a thick-bottomed frying pan with plenty of salted sweet lard until boiling hot.

  2. Carefully place the fish in the hot lard and fry gently until one side is a delicate brown.

  3. Turn the fish and fry the other side until done.

Serve

  1. Remove the fish carefully and serve immediately, or cover with a tin cover to keep warm.

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 + wheattop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour
Forms a light coating that helps the fish brown and crisp in the hot fat.
Sweet lard
Conducts heat for frying and gives the fish its browned, crisp surface.

The step that matters

Dry the fish before coating and frying. Surface moisture cools the hot fat and turns the coating soggy, so the fish steams rather than browning. Thorough drying lets the coating adhere and crisp properly.

“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.

More fried fish recipes

Breaded 6Battered 3Cakes 3Fillets 3in Batter 3Roe 3 See all 169 →

You might also like

Fish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipesBroiled FishBroiled Fish68 recipesFish CutletsFish Cutlets30 recipes