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Baked Smelts

Baked smelts are fish coated in breadcrumbs and butter, baked until golden, then finished with lemon juice, parsley, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Baked Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the smelts thoroughly.

  2. Place the smelts in a flat baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover with bread crumbs and dot with pieces of butter.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes.

  3. Add a little lemon juice.

  4. Garnish with parsley and lemon slices.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
Provide the main fish, which cooks gently in the oven and becomes tender and flaky.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust over the fish while keeping it moist underneath.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the crumbs brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Baking the crumb-covered smelts. Baking at the stated temperature for the stated time is needed so the fish cooks through while the crumbs brown. Too long and the small fish dries out.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (smelt, bread, butter, pepper, lemon, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against smelt, bread, butter, pepper, lemon, parsley. 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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