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Curried Whitebait

Fried whitebait coated in flour, seasoned with curry powder and sea salt, served with buttered brown bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,383 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curried Whitebait

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roll the whitebait in flour.

  2. Place them in a coarse sieve and shake to remove excess flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Put the whitebait in a wire basket and fry in very hot lard for 2 minutes.

  2. Mix 1 teaspoon of curry powder with 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt and sprinkle over the fried whitebait.

  3. Serve with slices of buttered brown bread.

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. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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

Whitebait
The small fish being cooked; its thin body fries quickly to a crisp exterior.
Flour
Coats the fish so the surface dries and crisps during frying.
Lard
Hot frying fat that cooks the coating quickly and gives a crisp, browned surface.
Curry powder
Adds aroma and warm spice flavour to the seasoning sprinkled on the fried fish.

The step that matters

Fry in very hot lard. Lard must be very hot so the flour coating crisps quickly. If the fat is cool, the fish absorbs oil and turns greasy and soggy instead of crisp.

“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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