Skip to main content
Main

Fillets of Mackerel

Fillets of mackerel cooked in a béchamel sauce with herbs, stock, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fillets of Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the mackerel and fillet it.

Poach and sauce

  1. Scald the herbs, chop them finely, and place them in a saucepan with the butter and stock.

  2. Add the mackerel to the saucepan and simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove the mackerel and place it on a hot dish.

  4. Dredge the mackerel with a little flour.

  5. Add the remaining ingredients.

  6. Bring to a boil.

  7. Pour over the mackerel.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mackerel
Forms the main body of the dish; its flesh firms and flakes as it gently simmers.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the herb sauce.
Béchamel sauce
Gives the dish a creamy, thick coating that clings to the fish.
Flour
Lightly coats the fish so the sauce has something to cling to and thickens it.

The step that matters

Simmering the mackerel gently for 10 minutes. Fish proteins set quickly and toughen and dry out if boiled hard. A gentle simmer keeps the flesh moist and tender while it cooks through.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, pepper, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes