Name: Fresh Mackerel
Ingredients: fresh mackerel; melted butter or drippings or olive oil; chopped parsley

Why it works: Butter and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Fresh Mackerel

Ingredients

fresh mackerel
melted butter or drippings or olive oil
chopped parsley

Directions

Prepare

Preheat the grill.
Grease the grill bars with butter.

Cook and serve

Rub the mackerel with melted butter, drippings, or olive oil.
Broil the mackerel until cooked through.
Garnish with chopped parsley before serving.

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.

Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh mackerel: Is the main protein, cooking through to a firm, flaky texture under the grill.
Melted butter or drippings or olive oil: Coats the fish to add moisture and help it brown evenly under the grill.

“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.