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Fried Bass

Fried Bass is a whole bass coated in flour and fried in butter and lard until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Bass

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dredge the cleaned bass with flour and season with salt.

Fry

  1. In a thick-bottomed frying pan, heat the butter and lard until boiling.

  2. Carefully place the fish in the hot fat and fry gently until one side is a golden brown.

  3. Turn the fish and fry the other side until golden brown.

Drain and serve

  1. Remove the fish from the fat and drain in a hot colander.

  2. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve immediately.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Bass
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by gentle frying.
Flour
Forms a coating that browns in the hot fat and helps the crust hold.
Butter
Adds rich flavour and helps the surface brown in the frying pan.
Lard
Provides a high-temperature frying fat that carries heat evenly to the fish.

The step that matters

Frying the fish in hot fat. The fat must be hot enough to crisp the flour coating quickly, but the fish should be fried gently so the flesh cooks through without the coating burning. Placing the fish carefully avoids breaking the coating.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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.

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