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Whitings Another Way

A simple fish dish where whitings are lightly floured and cooked in butter, then seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Whitings Another Way

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt butter in a frying pan.

  2. Lightly flour the whitings and cook them gently in the butter until done.

  3. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and ensure they are not greasy.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Whiting + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + whitingtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together510 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour 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

Whitings
The fish is the main component, cooked gently in butter until it turns tender and flakes.
Butter
Melted butter cooks the fish and adds richness and browning to its surface.
Flour
A light dusting of flour helps the fish brown and gives its surface a thin, crisp coating.

The step that matters

Cooking the whitings gently in the butter. Moderate heat cooks the fish through without burning the butter or drying the flesh. Lightly floured fish browns evenly at a gentle heat, while high heat scorches the flour and milk solids in the butter.

“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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