Name: To Fry or Broil Fish Properly
Ingredients: 1 whole fish, cleaned; ½ cup wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or Indian meal); sweet lard (1 tablespoon salt per pound of lard)

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

1 whole fish, cleaned
½ cup wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or Indian meal)
sweet lard (1 tablespoon salt per pound of lard)

Directions

Prepare

Lay the cleaned fish on a folded towel and dry it thoroughly.
Roll the fish in wheat flour or your preferred coating.

Fry

Heat a thick-bottomed frying pan with plenty of sweet lard until boiling.
Carefully place the fish in the hot lard and fry gently until one side is a delicate brown.
Turn the fish and fry the other side until done.

Serve

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.

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

Whole fish: Provides the main protein that cooks through in the hot fat.
Wheat flour: Forms a dry coating that browns crisply and helps seal in moisture.
Sweet lard: Conducts heat to cook the fish and gives the surface a golden, crisp finish.

The step that matters

Drying the fish before coating. Surface moisture turns to steam and makes the coating soggy or cause spattering. A thoroughly dried fish lets the flour adhere and brown evenly in the hot fat.

“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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To Fry or Broil Fish Properly