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Deviled Whitebait

A fried whitebait dish coated in flour and seasoned with pepper and cayenne, served hot with lemon and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Deviled Whitebait

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the whitebait

  1. Toss the whitebait in flour, moving them quickly and handling them as little as possible.

  2. Transfer the fish to a frying basket and sift excess flour back onto the paper.

  3. Heat the fat until very hot, then plunge the fish in for one minute.

  4. Shake well and serve immediately while very hot.

Season and serve

  1. Sprinkle cooked fish with a mix of pepper and cayenne.

  2. Serve with quartered lemon and thinly sliced brown bread and butter.

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

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Is the main food being fried, so it needs to be cooked briefly and served hot.
Flour
Forms a light coating on the fish that crisps when fried and helps it stay separate.
Fat for frying
Carries heat to the fish, cooking it quickly and crisping the flour coating.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fried fish.

The step that matters

Heat the fat until very hot before frying. If the fat is not very hot, the fish absorbs more oil and turns greasy and soft instead of crisp. Starting in very hot fat seals the flour coating quickly, so the fish cooks in the short one-minute frying time.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, bread, butter. 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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