Name: To Fry or Broil Fish Properly
Ingredients: 1 whole fish, cleaned; wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or cornmeal) for coating; sweet lard (or cooking oil); 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt (for each 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 whole fish, cleaned
wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or cornmeal) for coating
sweet lard (or cooking oil)
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt (for each pound of lard)

Directions

Prepare the fish

Dry the cleaned fish on a folded towel until all water is removed.
Coat the fish in wheat flour or your preferred coating.

Fry

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

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

Whole fish: Provides the main body of the dish, cooked through by frying.
Sweet lard: Frying medium that conducts heat and browns the coating and fish surface.

The step that matters

Frying the fish gently in hot lard. Fish is delicate and can break apart or burn outside before the inside cooks. Frying gently at a steady heat lets the centre cook through while the coating turns golden. Dry fish and a dry coating also help the crust set rather than steam.

“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