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Boiled Salt Mackerel

Boiled salted mackerel served with butter, parsley, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Salt Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the mackerel overnight.

  2. In the morning, remove the water and wash the mackerel thoroughly to remove all salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Prepare a deep pan of boiling water and place the mackerel in it.

  2. Boil for 10 to 15 minutes until the flesh begins to separate from the bones.

  3. Serve whole on a platter garnished with parsley.

  4. Pour melted butter and chopped parsley over the mackerel and serve hot.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Salt mackerel
Main protein; soaking and washing remove the salt so the fish is seasoned mildly.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the fish with fat as it is served hot.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 to 15 minutes until the flesh begins to separate from the bones. Boiling too long can make the flesh dry and fall apart, while too short leaves it firm and not fully cooked. Watching for flesh that just begins to separate from the bone gives a tender, moist result.

“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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