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Spanish Mackerel, Broiled

Broiled Spanish mackerel served with a butter‑flour sauce flavored with lemon, parsley, and consommé.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Spanish Mackerel, Broiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Split the large mackerel down the middle of the back.

  2. If using small mackerels, broil them whole.

  3. Season the fish with pepper and coarse sea salt, then rub with sweet oil.

Cook and serve the fish

  1. Place the fish in a double broiler and cook well on both sides.

  2. Transfer the fish to a hot dish, butter it nicely, and squeeze lemon juice over it.

  3. Garnish with parsley and lemon slices.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, melt butter in a saucepan, then add flour and blend without burning.

  2. Mix well over low heat and add the consommé, lemon juice, and parsley. Let it boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the well‑beaten egg yolk. Do not add the egg while cooking to prevent curdling.

  4. Serve the sauce with the broiled fish.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mackerel
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by broiling to a flaky texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and enriches the sauce while coating the fish.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with melted butter into a roux.
Consommé
Provides the liquid base of the sauce, adding savory flavor.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy body.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk thickens by gentle heat, and if it is added during boiling it can scramble and curdle. Removing the pan from the heat first, then stirring in the beaten yolk, keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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