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Boiled Salt Mackerel

A boiled salted mackerel seasoned with pepper and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Salt Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the fish.

  2. Soak the fish, skin side up, in cold water for 8 to 10 hours. If very salty, soak longer.

Cook

  1. Place the fish in a shallow pan, skin side up, and cover with cold water.

  2. Boil gently for 15 to 20 minutes.

  3. Carefully remove the fish and drain well.

Serve

  1. Place the fish in a hot dish, skin side down.

  2. Season the upper side with pepper and butter.

  3. Serve.

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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt mackerel
Provides the main flesh and is salted, so soaking removes excess salt before cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the cooked fish on the upper side.

The step that matters

Soaking the fish. Salt mackerel must soak long enough to draw out excess salt. Too little soaking leaves the fish harshly salty, while the gentle boil keeps the flesh tender rather than tough.

“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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