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To Dress Fish

A method for cleaning, soaking, boiling, and frying fish with salt, parsley, horseradish, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 562 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Dress Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Examine the fish to ensure it is properly cleaned.

  2. Soak freshwater fish in strong saltwater to remove muddy smell.

  3. Dry the fish.

  4. Boil water with a little salt.

  5. Add the fish carefully to the boiling water.

  6. Garnish with parsley and scraped horseradish after boiling.

Fry the fish

  1. Dry the fish with a cloth for frying.

  2. Coat the fish with flour.

  3. Heat plenty of dripping or hog's lard in a frying pan until boiling.

  4. Fry the fish until golden.

  5. Drain the fried fish on a dish or sieve.

Fry the parsley

  1. Wash the fried parsley.

  2. Dip the fried parsley in cold water.

  3. Fry the fried parsley in boiling fat until crisp.

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. Parsley + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Fish + horseradishtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Fish + parsleytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Is the main component; its flesh is cooked through boiling and then coated and fried.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that helps the fish brown and crisp in the hot fat.
Dripping or hog's lard
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the coating.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the fried fish.

The step that matters

Dry the fish before coating and frying. Surface moisture turns to steam in hot fat, which keeps the flour from adhering and stops the coating from crisping and browning evenly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, horseradish, 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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