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Trenton Falls Fry

A fried small fish dish seasoned with lemon, salt, pepper, herbs, breadcrumbs, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Trenton Falls Fry

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the small fish in the juice of 2 lemons, with salt, pepper, and chopped sweet herbs.

  2. Remove the fish, drain them, and stuff with bread crumbs soaked in milk.

Coat and fry

  1. Beat the yolks of 2 eggs and coat the stuffed fish in the egg mixture, then sprinkle with flour.

  2. Fry the fish until they are a good color and very dry and crisp.

  3. Serve the fish on a bed of fried parsley.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Small fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole and stuffed.
Lemon juice
Acidity that seasons the fish during soaking and brightens its flavor.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they make a moist stuffing that stays tender inside the fish.
Eggs
Egg yolks bind the coating so the flour adheres and the crust forms.
Flour
Dusted over the egg coating, it helps create a dry, crisp surface when fried.

The step that matters

Fry until very dry and crisp. Frying long enough to drive off surface moisture gives a crisp, browned crust. Underfried fish stays soft and can taste watery where the coating meets the flesh.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, lemon, pepper, bread, milk, egg, flour):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, lemon, pepper, bread, milk, egg, flour. 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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