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Smelts on Skewers

Smelts on skewers are fish fillets coated in flour or breadcrumbs, broiled and served with sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Smelt and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Smelts on Skewers

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dip smelts in milk.

  2. Roll smelts in flour.

  3. Coat smelts with bread crumbs.

Skewer and cook

  1. Insert a skewer through the eyes of 4 to 6 smelts.

  2. Baste with olive oil and season with coarse sea salt.

  3. Broil over a brisk fire until cooked through.

Serve

  1. Serve with your choice of sauces.

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. Smelt + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together103 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Bread + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + olivetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,828 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 cooked whole on the skewer.
Milk
Helps the flour coating adhere evenly to the fish surface.
Flour
Forms a thin dry coating that helps the skin brown and crisp.
Olive oil
Adds fat that keeps the fish moist and promotes even browning.

The step that matters

Broil over a brisk fire until cooked through. Small fish cook quickly, so high heat must brown the coating while the flesh turns opaque. Too little heat leaves the fish soggy, and too long a cook dries it 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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