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Preserving Meat and Fish By Sugar

Preserves fish by rubbing brown sugar and saltpetre, curing for days, then drying to prevent mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and salmon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,078 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Preserving Meat and Fish By Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Open the fish and rub the brown sugar into it, similar to how you would with salt.

  2. Leave the fish for a few days to allow the sugar to preserve it.

  3. If you want to keep the fish for a long time, dry it afterward, exposing new surfaces to the air frequently to prevent mold.

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. Fish + salmontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Sugar + salmontop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together931 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + fishtop 42% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Draws moisture out of the fish and slows spoilage, preserving the flesh.
Fish
The main ingredient, whose moisture the sugar draws out to preserve it.

The step that matters

Drying and exposing new surfaces to air. Mold grows on moist surfaces. Sugar alone may not keep the surface dry enough, so drying and turning the fish to expose fresh surfaces helps prevent mold during long storage.

“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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