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Baked Pickerel

A whole pickerel stuffed, buttered, and baked with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baked Pickerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the head from the pickerel and clean it thoroughly without cutting it open.

  2. Prepare stuffing using milk for moistening, and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Fill the fish with the stuffing and sew or tie cloth over the openings to retain it.

Bake and serve

  1. Place lumps of butter on the fish or lard it with strips of fat salt pork.

  2. Put the fish in a long dripping pan on a rack or pieces of broken earthen plates to prevent sticking.

  3. Add milk to the pan, not water, and baste occasionally as it bakes, adding more milk if necessary.

  4. Bake until well done, about 2 to 3 hours for a 10 to 15-pound pickerel.

  5. Remove caps and strings before serving. Serve with cream 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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Turkey + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together281 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turkey + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 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

Pickerel
The main fish, whose mild flesh is cooked through and served as the dish.
Stuffing
Fills the cavity, adding moisture and flavour to the fish as it bakes.
Milk
Moistens the stuffing and, as the pan liquid, keeps the fish moist while it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the fish and helps it brown and stay moist.
Fat salt pork
Larding strips add fat that bastes the fish from within and adds savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Add milk to the pan and baste as it bakes. A long bake can dry out a lean fish. Milk in the pan, basted over the fish and topped up as it reduces, keeps the surface moist and the flesh tender.

“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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