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Baked Mackerel

Baked whole mackerel stuffed with forcemeat, butter, pepper, and salt.

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 ↓

Baked Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the fish and remove the roe.

  2. Fill the fish with forcemeat and sew up the slit.

  3. Flour the fish and place them in a dish, alternating heads and tails with the roe.

Bake

  1. Add small pieces of butter and season with pepper and salt between each layer.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

Serve

  1. Serve with melted butter or a maître d'hôtel 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

Mackerel
Oily flesh that firms and flakes as it cooks, forming the main body of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps keep the fish moist as it bakes.

The step that matters

Baking the fish for 30 minutes at 400°F (200°C). Mackerel is done when the thickest flesh turns opaque and flakes easily. Oily fish dries out quickly once it is past that point, so check it near the end of the baking time.

“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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