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Pickled Smelts, Preferred to Anchovies

Pickled smelts seasoned with salt, mace, cloves, pepper, cochineal, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and laurel are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,516 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Smelts, Preferred to Anchovies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Open the smelts at the belly and wipe them clean with damp cloths.

  2. Remove the roes and coat the fish lightly with the seasoning mixture.

Layer and press

  1. Layer the fish and seasoning alternately in a deep jar that is wide at the top.

  2. Mix the saltpetre, coarse sea salt, mace, cloves, black pepper, and cochineal well.

  3. Press the fish down in the jar.

Pickle

  1. Boil enough pickling vinegar with bay leaves and laurel leaves, then let it cool.

  2. Pour the cooled vinegar over the fish and tie leather over the jar.

  3. Let the fish pickle for at least three months for best flavor.

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. Clove + laureltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Pepper + laureltop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Mace + laureltop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,164 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the fish and helps preserve it during pickling.
Pickling vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the fish and gives the pickle its sharp flavor.
Cochineal
Gives the pickled fish its colour.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the fish.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, aromatic heat to the seasoning mixture.

The step that matters

Let the vinegar cool before pouring it over the fish. Pouring hot vinegar over the smelts would partly cook the delicate flesh, changing its texture before pickling begins, so the vinegar must be cooled first.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, pepper, vinegar, laurel):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, pepper, vinegar, laurel. 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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