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Pickled Smelts

Pickled smelts are smelt fish preserved in a spice and vinegar mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Pickled Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the smelts

  1. Gut and wash the smelts thoroughly.

  2. Lay the smelts in rows on their sides in a stone jar.

Spice and pickle

  1. Mix together the black pepper, mace, cloves, coarse sea salt, saltpetre, and cochineal.

  2. Scatter the spice mixture between each row of smelts.

  3. Boil enough red wine vinegar to completely cover the smelts.

  4. Allow the vinegar to cool, then pour it over the smelts.

  5. Seal the jar tightly with a bladder.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Clove + red winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Red wine + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
The fish being preserved; they are the main body of the dish.
Red wine vinegar
Acid that covers the fish and works as the pickling medium, lowering pH to preserve it.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the fish and helps preserve it against spoilage.
Saltpetre
Helps cure the fish and gives it a firm texture and preserved colour.
Cochineal
Natural colouring that gives the pickled fish its red hue.

The step that matters

Pour the vinegar over cooled, not hot. The vinegar must be allowed to cool before it is poured over the smelts, because hot liquid would partly cook the delicate fish and soften its texture before pickling begins.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against smelt, pepper, clove, red wine, vinegar. 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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