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To Pickle Smelts

A pickled fish dish using smelts, red port, vinegar, spices, and sweet oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Pickle Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lay the smelts in rows in a jar.

  2. In a pot, combine red port, lemon slices, vinegar, ginger, nutmeg, mace, pepper, coarse sea salt, cochineal, saltpetre, sugar, and bay leaf.

  3. Boil the mixture, skim it clean, and pour it over the smelts.

Seal and store

  1. Once cooled, pour a little sweet oil over the smelts.

  2. Seal the jar tightly with bladder and leather.

  3. Store it in a cool place.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 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

Smelts
Are the main fish that are preserved and flavoured by the pickling liquid.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the fish and sharpens the flavour of the pickle.
Red port
Adds sweetness and depth to the pickling liquid.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and rounds out the flavour.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the fish and keeps the flesh firm and colour stable during storage.
Cochineal
Adds a red colour to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture, skim it clean, and pour it over the smelts. Boiling the hot vinegar liquor helps it penetrate and preserve the fish, and skimming removes impurities that could spoil the pickle. Pouring it over the fish while it is hot starts the pickling process.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (smelt, lemon, vinegar, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against smelt, lemon, vinegar, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, sugar. 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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