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Salted Fish

A preserved fish cured with salt and garlic, left to cure for 24 hours then aged 10‑15 days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and garlic work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 264 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Salted Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut off the head and tail of the fish and clean properly.

  2. Split the fish in half lengthwise and remove the backbone.

  3. Slice the fish into 1‑inch thick pieces, keeping skin on one side.

  4. Optionally, rub pressed garlic juice over the slices before salting.

Salt and cure

  1. Salt all pieces thickly and leave for 24 hours.

  2. Place the fish in a small wooden keg and cover with a cloth.

  3. After 10 to 15 days, the fish is ready to serve as a relish.

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 + garlictop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the flesh that is preserved and cured into a relish.
Salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the fish during curing.
Garlic
Adds aroma and flavour to the fish when its juice is rubbed on the slices.

The step that matters

Salting all pieces thickly. Salt draws water out of the fish and stops spoilage bacteria from growing. Uneven or light salting leaves thin spots where the fish can spoil before the cure is complete.

“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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