Name: Broiled Mackerel
Ingredients: 1 fresh mackerel; coarse sea salt; black pepper; butter

Why it works: Pepper and butter 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 ↓

Broiled Mackerel

Ingredients

1 fresh mackerel
coarse sea salt
black pepper
butter

Directions

Prepare

Wash and wipe the mackerel.
Season the mackerel with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Broil

Place the mackerel in a broiler over coals.
Add salt, pepper, and butter to the dish before placing 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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mackerel: The main protein; its oily flesh stays moist and tender as it cooks.
Butter: Adds fat that carries flavour and helps keep the fish moist.

“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.