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Broiled Salt Mackerel

Broiled salt mackerel seasoned with pepper and butter, cooked in a suet‑greased broiler.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Broiled Salt Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and soak the mackerel as if boiling.

  2. Rub the mackerel with melted butter and season with pepper.

  3. Grease a broiler with suet and place the mackerel inside down.

Broil and serve

  1. Broil the inside first, then turn and broil the skin side without burning.

  2. Spread with butter or serve with maitre d'hotel sauce.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt mackerel
Is the main fish, cooked through by broiling and carrying the dish's flavour.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the fish stay tender and brown lightly under heat.
Suet
Greases the broiler so the fish does not stick and its fat helps the skin crisp.

The step that matters

Broil the skin side without burning. Salt mackerel has a fatty skin and sugars that brown quickly under high heat. Once the inside is cooked, the skin can scorch before the fish is evenly done, so watch it closely and turn it carefully.

“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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