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Mock Whitebait

A dish of sole strips coated in seasoned flour and fried in beef suet.

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 ↓

Mock Whitebait

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Fillet the sole and cut it into strips the size of whitebait.

  2. Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice on the fish.

  3. Season the flour with pepper and salt.

  4. Place the flour on a sheet of paper.

Fry

  1. Toss the fish strips in the flour quickly.

  2. Transfer the fish to a frying basket.

  3. Sift away excess flour.

  4. Heat the beef suet.

  5. Fry the fish quickly until pale brown.

  6. Drain the fish.

Serve

  1. Serve on a doily with slices of lemon and parsley, alongside thin slices of brown bread and butter.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + lemontop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,278 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sole
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked into delicate, crisp-edged strips.
Refined beef suet
Serves as the frying fat, conducting heat to brown and crisp the coating.
Flour
Forms a thin dry coating that helps the fish brown and crisp when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the fish quickly until pale brown. Fish is delicate and cooks fast; frying briefly in hot fat sets the coating and keeps the flesh moist, while longer cooking dries it out and darkens the flour.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, flour. 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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