Name: To Fry or Broil Fish Properly
Ingredients: 1 fish, cleaned and dried; ½ cup wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or cornmeal); plenty of sweet lard (1 tablespoon salt per pound of lard)

Why it works: Fish and wheat work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 37 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

To Fry or Broil Fish Properly

Ingredients

1 fish, cleaned and dried
½ cup wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or cornmeal)
plenty of sweet lard (1 tablespoon salt per pound of lard)

Directions

Prepare

Dry the fish thoroughly on a folded towel.
Roll the fish in wheat flour or your preferred coating.

Fry

Heat a thick-bottomed frying pan with plenty of sweet lard until boiling.
Carefully lay the fish in the hot lard and fry gently until one side is a fine golden brown.
Turn the fish and fry the other side until done.
Remove the fish and serve immediately, or keep it covered to stay hot.

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.

Fish + wheattop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together37 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish: Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by frying in fat.
Wheat flour: Forms a coating that browns in the hot fat and helps the crust stay crisp.
Sweet lard: Conducts heat to cook the fish and browns the coating into a golden crust.

The step that matters

Carefully lay the fish in the hot lard and fry gently until one side is a fine golden brown.. Fat must be hot enough to brown the coating quickly, otherwise the fish absorbs more grease and the crust turns soggy. Frying gently while the first side browns lets the fish cook through without burning the outside.

“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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To Fry or Broil Fish Properly