Skip to main content
Main

Fried Whitefish Etc

A whole whitefish is seasoned, dredged, and fried in dripping or lard, then garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fried Whitefish Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scale and wash the fish.

  2. Trim off the fins and remove the gills.

  3. Wipe the fish dry.

  4. Dredge the fish with salt, pepper, and flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the dripping or lard in a frying pan.

  2. Once hot, add the fish to the pan.

  3. Brown one side, then turn and brown the other side.

  4. Carefully remove the fish and place it on a hot dish.

  5. Garnish with parsley and serve.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Whitefish + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Whitefish + parsleytop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Whitefish
Provides the main body of the dish, cooking through as it fries.
Flour
Coats the fish so its surface browns and crisps in the hot fat.
Dripping or lard
Conducts heat to the fish and gives the coating a rich, browned surface.

The step that matters

Wipe the fish dry before dredging. Surface moisture would make the flour clump and steam rather than brown, so the coating would not crisp well in the fat.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (whitefish, pepper, flour):

  1. Jalapenofits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Dillfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against whitefish, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes