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Fried Salt Mackerel

Fried Salt Mackerel is a dish of mackerel pieces coated in flour and fried, served with a milk or cream butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Fried Salt Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the heads from the mackerel and soak them overnight.

  2. Wash and drain the mackerel.

  3. Cut each mackerel lengthwise and crosswise into four pieces.

  4. Roll the pieces in sifted flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the coated mackerel in hot drippings until golden brown.

  2. Heat the milk (or cream) and butter together.

  3. Pour the heated mixture over the fried mackerel on a platter.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mackerel
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked by frying until golden.
Sifted flour
Forms a light coating that helps the fish brown in the hot fat.
Drippings
Hot fat that fries the coated fish and gives it a golden crust.
Milk or cream
Adds richness and moisture to the sauce poured over the fried fish.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the warm milk or cream poured over the fish.

The step that matters

Fry the coated mackerel in hot drippings until golden brown. The fish must be fried in hot fat so the flour coating sets and browns quickly. If the fat is not hot enough, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisp.

“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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