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Broiled Sardines on Toast

Broiled sardines served on toasted bread with butter, lemon, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Broiled Sardines on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Broil the sardines

  1. Preheat the broiler.

  2. Arrange sardines in a double broiler and broil for 2 minutes on each side.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the toast on a hot dish.

  2. Carefully lay the sardines over the toast.

  3. Pour the maître d'hôtel butter over the sardines.

  4. Decorate with lemon quarters and serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 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

Sardines
The main ingredient; the broiler cooks the flesh through and browns the skin.
Maître d'hôtel butter
Adds richness and moisture as it melts over the hot fish.
Dry toast
Gives a firm base that soaks up the melted butter and fish juices.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, oily flavour of the sardines.

The step that matters

Broiling the sardines. Sardines are thin and oily, so two minutes a side is quick. The broiler must be hot and the fish watched closely, because overcooking dries the flesh while the skin needs to blister and brown.

“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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