Name: Boiled Turbot, Garnished with Fried Smelts
Ingredients: 1 whole turbot; oil for frying; fried smelts

Why it works: Turbot and smelt share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 26 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Turbot, Garnished with Fried Smelts

Ingredients

1 whole turbot
oil for frying
fried smelts

Directions

Boil the turbot until cooked through.
In a separate pan, heat oil for frying.
Fry the smelts until golden brown.
Serve the boiled turbot garnished with the fried smelts.

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.

Turbot + smelttop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together26 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Turbot: Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by gentle boiling.
Smelts: Fried until golden brown, adding crisp texture and browned flavour as a garnish.

“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.