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Baked Mackerel

Baked mackerel with cider, onion, nutmeg, parsley, stock, egg yolk, flour, butter, tarragon vinegar, and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Baked Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Place the mackerel in an enameled stewpan with cider, minced onion, nutmeg, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cover and cook gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Carefully remove the fish.

Make the sauce

  1. Add white stock, egg yolk, flour, and butter, then heat the mixture until hot.

  2. Strain the sauce.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the fish in a baking dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the fish.

  3. Sprinkle the fish with bread crumbs and bake until lightly browned.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce as it heats and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce, giving it body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Bread crumbs
Form a crust that browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce with egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated, but if the mixture gets too hot it can curdle or scramble. Heat gently and stir so the sauce becomes smooth and lightly thickened.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, nutmeg, parsley, pepper, veal, egg, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, nutmeg, parsley, pepper, veal, egg, flour. 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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