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Bloater Toast

A toast topped with a mixture of grilled bloater fish and fried roe.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Roe and egg work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 243 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bloater Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bloaters

  1. Remove the roe from the bloaters.

  2. Grill the bloaters, then remove the skin and bones.

  3. Chop the bloaters and rub them through a fine sieve.

Make the fish mixture

  1. Heat 1 oz. of butter in a small saucepan, add the fish, and heat until hot.

  2. Add the egg, season with salt and cayenne, and stir until the mixture thickens.

Fry the roe and serve

  1. Meanwhile, divide the roe into 8 pieces and fry them in hot fat.

  2. Spread the fish mixture on the buttered toast and top with the fried roe.

  3. Serve immediately in small portions.

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. Roe + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together243 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Roe + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bloaters
Provide the main flavour and the fish base of the spread.
Egg
Binds the fish mixture and thickens it as it is stirred with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the fish mixture and fries the roe.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg into the fish mixture. Egg proteins set when heated, so the mixture thickens. If it is overheated or stirred too hard after the egg goes in, it can curdle or turn grainy instead of smooth.

“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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