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To Pickle Fish

A fish dish pickled in vinegar and oil after being fried and coated with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

To Pickle Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pickle base

  1. Combine vinegar, garlic, mace, whole pepper, and oil in a bowl. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

  2. Mix the oil and vinegar well and allow the mixture to cool completely.

Fry the fish

  1. Slice the onion and layer it in the bottom of a pot.

  2. Cut the fish into thin slices, wash, dry, and flour them.

  3. Dip the fish slices in egg yolks and fry in hot oil until golden brown.

  4. Drain the fried fish until cool, then layer them in the pot with onion, mace, cloves, and nutmeg.

Pickle and seal

  1. Make a pickle with white wine vinegar, shallots, garlic, white pepper, Jamaica pepper, long pepper, juniper berries, and salt. Boil until garlic is tender.

  2. Once the pickle is cool, pour it over the fish and add a little oil on top.

  3. Cover the pot 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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish, and its flour coating helps the slices crisp when fried.
Egg yolks
Coat the floured fish, adding richness and helping the outside brown when fried.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves and sharpens the flavour of the fish as it pickles.
Oil
Carries flavour and keeps the fish moist, and sealing the top limits contact with air.

The step that matters

Fry the fish until golden brown. Frying the floured, egg-coated slices until golden seals the surface and gives them structure, so they hold up when the cooled pickle is poured over them.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, clove, garlic, pepper, onion, fish, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, clove, garlic, pepper, onion, fish, 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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