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To Bake Smelts

Smelt fish baked with breadcrumbs, butter, mace, salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and garnished with fried parsley and lemon wedges.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 flat baking dish.

Season and bake

  1. Cover the smelts with bread crumbs and dot with pieces of butter.

  2. Season with salt, cayenne, and pounded mace.

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

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, add a squeeze of lemon juice and garnish with fried parsley and lemon wedges.

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

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

  5. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
Provide the delicate fish that is the main component of the dish.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden topping that protects the fish while it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the crumb topping brown.
Pounded mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor to the fish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and fish.

The step that matters

Drying the smelts before baking. Excess surface moisture steams the fish and keeps the bread crumbs from crisping, so the smelts must be patted fully dry before the crumbs and butter go on.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (smelt, bread, butter, pepper, lemon, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against smelt, bread, butter, pepper, lemon, parsley. 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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