Why it works: Smelt and egg work together. They rank in the top 38% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 174 recipes. The science ↓
Fbied Smelts
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Clean the smelts by splitting them just enough to remove the insides.
Soak the smelts in salt water for 1 hour, then wash and dry them.
Beat the eggs in a plate and place the cracker crumbs in another plate.
Heat the lard in a frying pan until very hot.
Fry and serve
Dip the smelts in the eggs, then roll them in the cracker crumbs.
Fry the smelts in the hot lard until they are light brown.
Serve hot with drawn butter.
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.
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Smelt + eggtop 38% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together174 recipes
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Smelts
- Form the main body of the dish, cooking through while staying tender inside.
- Eggs
- Bind the cracker crumbs to the fish so the coating adheres during frying.
- Cracker crumbs
- Form a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot fat.
- Lard
- Conducts heat for frying, crisping the coating and browning the fish.
The step that matters
Fry the smelts in the hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisp. Hot fat seals the crumb coating quickly, so the fish cooks through before it dries out.
“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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