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Fried Fresh Fish

A dish of fresh fish fried slowly in salt pork fat and finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and pork work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 668 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Fried Fresh Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the fish and drain it.

  2. If the fish is large, cut it into squares; leave small fish whole.

  3. Sprinkle the fish with coarse sea salt, then dust it with Indian meal.

Fry

  1. Fry the salt pork in a pan.

  2. Place the fish in the hot fat.

  3. Cook the fish slowly for about 1 hour until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Put bits of butter on a hot platter.

  2. Lay the fish on top of the butter.

  3. 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. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a firm, flaky texture as it fries.
Indian meal (cornmeal)
Forms a dry coating that browns in the hot fat, giving the fish a crisp golden crust.
Salt pork
Renders fat into the pan, providing the hot frying medium that browns the fish.
Butter
Melts on the hot platter, adding richness and moisture under the fried fish.

The step that matters

Cook the fish slowly. Slow frying in hot fat lets the heat reach the centre before the coating darkens too far. Cooking too fast can scorch the cornmeal crust while the interior stays underdone.

“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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