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White Bait

Fried whitebait coated in flour and served with salt, bread, butter, cayenne, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

White Bait

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat an iron frying pan about 4 inches deep and add enough lard to cover ½ inch.

  2. Spread 1 quart of flour on a cloth.

  3. Take a couple of handfuls of white bait and sprinkle them thinly on the flour.

  4. Place the mixture in a sieve and sift the flour off the white bait.

Fry and serve

  1. Carefully add the white bait to the boiling lard.

  2. Fry until crisp, then remove from the pan.

  3. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and serve with brown bread, butter, cayenne, and lemon.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 food being fried, cooking quickly to a crisp texture.
Flour
Coats the white bait so it dries and crisps when fried.
Lard
Fat for frying that transfers heat evenly and gives a crisp, golden surface.

The step that matters

Carefully add the white bait to the boiling lard. Fat that is not hot enough lets the coated fish soak up grease and turn soggy, while wet or loosely floured fish can spatter. Dropping it in gently keeps the lard at frying heat and the coating intact.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, bread, butter):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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