Skip to main content
Main

To Fry Smelts

A dish of smelts coated in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs, fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Fry Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the smelts without washing them too much.

  2. Dry them with a cloth.

  3. Lightly flour the smelts and shake off excess flour.

  4. Dip the smelts in plenty of egg, then coat with fine bread crumbs.

Fry

  1. Plunge them into a pan of boiling lard.

  2. Fry until they are a bright yellow brown, about a few minutes.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Smelt + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Smelt + breadtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Smelts
The main fish, cooked whole in a crisp coating.
Flour
Dry coating that helps the egg adhere and gives a light base.
Egg
Wet binder that holds the bread crumbs to the fish.
Bread crumbs
Forms the crisp, golden outer crust when fried.
Lard
Hot frying fat that conducts heat and browns the coating.

The step that matters

Dry the smelts before coating. Surface moisture turns to steam in hot fat and can loosen the flour, egg and crumb coating, so thorough drying helps the crust stay attached and crisp.

“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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes