Skip to main content
Main

Whitebait, Plain and Devilled

A dish of whitebait coated in flour, briefly fried in lard, then seasoned with cayenne pepper and served with lemon, bread and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Whitebait, Plain and Devilled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the whitebait in very cold water and drain it.

  2. Dab the whitebait with a clean cloth while on a sieve.

  3. Turn it out onto another dry cloth and dredge it thickly with baked flour. Shake the cloth to make the flour adhere to the whitebait.

Fry

  1. Heat a bright stewpan half full of boiling lard.

  2. Put the whitebait into a flying-net that fits the pan.

  3. Dip the whitebait quickly into the lard for one minute. Take it out and shake it well to prevent sticking.

  4. Shake cayenne pepper over the whitebait before the second dip. Dip the whitebait again for one to two minutes and let the lard drain off.

Serve

  1. Serve the whitebait piled on a hot dish.

  2. Serve with cut lemon, cayenne, and 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 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

Whitebait
The main ingredient, cooked whole in hot fat until crisp.
Baked flour
Coats the fish so it forms a dry, crisp, golden crust when fried.
Boiling lard
Conducts heat quickly, cooking the fish and browning the coating into a crisp shell.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat and a sharp, spicy flavour to the fried fish.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fried fish.

The step that matters

Shaking off excess flour and lard before serving. Loose flour and lard left on the fish can burn or make it greasy and soggy, so the whitebait should be shaken well and drained.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Plumfits less well

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

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes