Skip to main content
Main

Bloater Toast

A toast topped with a mixture of chopped bloater fish, egg, butter, and fried roes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Roe and egg work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 243 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bloater Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the roes from the bloaters.

  2. Grill the bloaters.

  3. Remove the skin and bones from the grilled bloaters.

  4. Chop the bloaters.

  5. Pass the chopped bloaters through a fine sieve.

Make the fish paste

  1. Heat 2 oz. of butter or fat in a small saucepan.

  2. Add the fish to the pan.

  3. Heat the fish until hot.

  4. Stir in the egg.

  5. Season with salt and cayenne.

  6. Cook until the mixture thickens.

Fry the roes and serve

  1. Divide the roes into 8 pieces.

  2. Fry the roes in hot fat.

  3. Spread the fish mixture on the buttered toast.

  4. Top the toast with the fried roes.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Roe + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together243 recipes

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

  2. Roe + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bloaters
Provide the main fish flavour and the soft roes that form the topping.
Butter or good fat
Carries the fish flavour and keeps the mixture rich and moist while it heats.
Egg
Binds the sieved fish and thickens it as it cooks gently.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture thickens. The egg proteins set when heated, so the mixture thickens; if the heat is too high the egg can scramble and turn grainy, so keep it gentle and stir constantly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes