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Baked Spanish Mackerel

A baked Spanish mackerel seasoned with salt, topped with bacon, butter, and red pepper, cooked in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper 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 ↓

Baked Spanish Mackerel

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the head and fins from the fish.

  2. Season the fish with salt and place it in a pan.

  3. Lay the bacon strips on top of the fish.

Bake

  1. Add boiling water.

  2. Add butter.

  3. Add red pepper.

  4. Bake until the fish is done.

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. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  2. Spanish mackerel + buttertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together34 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

  3. Spanish mackerel + peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Spanish mackerel
Provides the main protein, which firms and turns opaque as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the fish take on golden color.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor that drips down over the fish as it bakes.

The step that matters

Bake until the fish is done. Fish cooks quickly and turns dry and tough once overcooked. Check doneness near the thickest part, where the flesh should look opaque and flake easily with a fork.

“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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