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Mock Whitebait

A vegetarian dish of parboiled vegetable marrow cut into whitebait-sized pieces, dusted with flour and cayenne, fried in fat, served with lime.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,491 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mock Whitebait

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the vegetable marrow until tender.

  2. Cut the marrow into pieces the size of whitebait.

  3. Roll the pieces in flour on a cloth.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the pieces in boiling fat until golden yellow.

  2. Lift them out, drain, and serve with a dusting of cayenne and lime quarters.

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 + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + limetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrow
Forms the bulk of the dish and turns tender and mild when parboiled before frying.
Flour
Dry coating that helps the pieces brown and crisp during frying.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling fat. The fat must be hot enough to crisp and brown the floured pieces quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy 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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