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White Bait

A lightly coated whitebait fish served with butter and optional cayenne pepper, sea salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

White Bait

Ingredients

Directions

Coat the fish

  1. Gently toss the whitebait in a cloth with flour to coat them lightly.

  2. Transfer the fish to a sieve to remove excess flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat plenty of boiling butter in a pan and add the fish for just a moment; do not let them brown.

  2. Arrange the fish on a serving dish, piled high in the center.

  3. Serve with brown bread and butter.

  4. For devilled whitebait, allow them to brown slightly, then sprinkle with cayenne pepper and coarse sea salt, and serve with lemon juice.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

White bait
Is the main ingredient, cooked briefly so the delicate flesh stays tender and moist.
Flour
Forms a light coating that helps the fish crisp slightly in the hot butter.
Butter
Fries the fish quickly, providing rich flavor and a golden crust on contact.

The step that matters

Frying the fish briefly. Whitebait are very small and thin, so they cook in moments. Leaving them in the hot butter too long dries them out and makes them tough, which is why the plain version should not be allowed to brown.

“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 →

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