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Fried Smelts

Fried smelts are smelt fish coated in beaten eggs and bread crumbs, then fried and served with tartar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fried Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a slight opening at the gills of the smelts and remove the insides.

  2. Dip the smelts in the beaten eggs, then coat them with bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat Cottolene in a pan until very hot and fry the smelts until golden.

  2. Drain the fried smelts, dust with coarse sea salt, and serve immediately with tartar sauce.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Smelt + breadtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Smelt + eggtop 38% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together174 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
Small whole fish that form the main body of the dish and cook quickly as they fry.
Eggs
Bind the bread crumbs to the fish so the coating holds during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp golden coating that browns in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Frying in very hot fat. Fat must be very hot before the fish goes in. Hot oil sets the crumb coating quickly and browns it, so the fish does not absorb excess oil and turn greasy or soggy.

“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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