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Mackerel, Baked

A baked mackerel stuffed with forcemeat, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Mackerel, Baked

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

  1. Clean the mackerel and remove the roe.

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

Bake

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

  2. Add small pieces of butter and season with pepper and salt between layers.

  3. Bake for 1 hour 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
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the rich, oily flesh that cooks through in the oven.
Butter
Adds moisture and richness, basting the fish as it melts during baking.
Forcemeat
Stuffing that adds moisture and flavour inside the fish as it cooks.

The step that matters

Bake for 1 hour at 400°F (200°C). Mackerel is oily and delicate, and overbaking dries the flesh. Keeping the fish whole under butter and flour helps it stay moist while the stuffing heats through.

“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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