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Jellied Pickerel

A pickled fish dish made by boiling pickerel with spices and vinegar until it sets into a jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Jellied Pickerel

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Bring water, vinegar, salt, peppercorns, allspice, bay leaves, and carrot to a boil.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Add celery, onion, lemon slices, and pickerel pieces.

  4. Boil for an additional 10 minutes.

Set the jelly

  1. Pour into a deep bowl and let cool.

  2. Refrigerate until set to jell.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Allspice + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

  4. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

  5. Allspice + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,422 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pickerel
The fish is the main ingredient, cooked in the spiced liquid and set within it.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that flavours the liquid and helps firm the fish while it poaches.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, allspice, carrot, celery, lemon):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, allspice, carrot, celery, lemon. 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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