Skip to main content
Main

O Whitebait

A fried whitebait dish coated in flour and served with lemon and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

O Whitebait

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat the lard in a stewpan until very hot, about 400°F (200°C).

  2. Carefully pick the whitebait from the water and lay them on a sieve to dry.

  3. Place the flour on a sheet of kitchen paper.

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

  5. Transfer the fish to a frying basket and sift the loose flour back onto the paper.

Fry and serve

  1. Plunge the fish into the hot fat for one minute; shake well and serve immediately while very hot.

  2. To devil the whitebait, sprinkle with a mixture of pepper and cayenne after cooking.

  3. Serve with quartered lemon and thinly cut 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
The delicate fish that is the main component, coated lightly and fried until crisp.
Flour
Forms a thin dry coating that crisps in the hot fat and helps the fish stay separate.
Lard or clarified fat
Hot fat that fries the coating quickly, producing a crisp exterior.

The step that matters

Keeping the fat very hot. Fat that is too cool lets the flour coating absorb oil and turn greasy instead of crisp. Starting with very hot fat and frying briefly sets the coating fast, so the fish stays crisp and light.

“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.

More whitebait recipes

Fried 17Deviled 3Mock 3 See all 9 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes