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Fish Omelet

A fried egg and shredded fish mixture cooked in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fish Omelet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Season the shredded cold fish.

  2. Mix the seasoned fish with the beaten eggs to form a paste.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat plenty of boiling butter in a pan.

  2. Fry the mixture in thin cakes like pancakes until golden brown.

  3. Serve hot on a napkin.

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. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Fish + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,782 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the fish into a paste that holds together when fried.
Cold fish
Forms the main body of the omelette, giving it flavour and substance.
Butter
Fries the cakes, adding fat for browning and a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the cakes in plenty of hot butter. The cakes are thin and delicate, so they need enough hot fat to brown quickly and evenly. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction, which needs sustained surface heat. Too little or cool butter lets the cakes soak up fat and stick or break.

“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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