Name: To Fry or Broil Fish Properly
Ingredients: 1 whole fish, cleaned; ½ cup wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or Indian meal); sweet lard (enough to fill the frying pan); 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
½ cup wheat flour (or rolled crackers, grated stale bread, or Indian meal)
sweet lard (enough to fill the frying pan)
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt (for each pound of lard)

Directions

Prepare

Lay the cleaned fish on a folded towel and dry it thoroughly.
Roll the fish in wheat flour or your preferred coating.

Fry

Heat a thick-bottomed frying pan with plenty of sweet lard until boiling hot.
Carefully place the fish in the hot lard and fry gently until one side is a delicate brown.
Turn the fish and fry the other side until done.

Serve

Remove the fish carefully and serve immediately, or cover with a tin cover to keep 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

Wheat flour: Forms a thin coating that crisps and browns in the hot fat.
Sweet lard: Conducts heat evenly and fries the fish, giving it a crisp, browned surface.

The step that matters

Carefully place the fish in the hot lard and fry gently until one side is a delicate brown.. Fat must be very hot so the coating sets quickly and seals; if the fish is dried poorly or the fat is too cool, the coating absorbs grease and may stick or fall off.

“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