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Fried Whitebait, Plain and Devilled

A dish of whitebait coated in egg and breadcrumbs, fried until golden and served with lemon and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Fried Whitebait, Plain and Devilled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Carefully pick over the whitebait, removing any weeds.

  2. Soak the whitebait in a basin of cold water with a lump of ice until ready to use.

  3. Dip the whitebait in the beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat plenty of frying fat in a pan until boiling.

  2. Fry the coated whitebait until pale golden in color.

  3. Drain on dish paper and garnish with fresh parsley.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whitebait
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole in a crisp coating.
Whole egg
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs stick to the fish.
White bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the coated whitebait until pale golden. Frying in plenty of very hot fat seals the coating quickly so it crisps rather than absorbing oil. Overcooking dries the small fish and darkens the crumbs.

“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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