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Stuffed Pickerel

A fish stuffed with bread, eggs, parsley, onion, and spices, then boiled and served with a gelatinous stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stuffed Pickerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the head off the pickerel carefully and remove the skin, leaving the tail on.

  2. Chop the fish meat.

  3. Moisten the bread slices with milk mixed with eggs.

  4. Chop the moistened bread with the fish meat, adding parsley, salt, and pepper.

  5. Chop the onion.

  6. Fry the onion in butter.

  7. Add the fried onion to the meat mixture.

  8. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

Stuff and cook

  1. Fill the skin with the mixture.

  2. Sew the skin up and attach the head.

  3. Boil the stuffed fish for one hour.

Make the jelly and serve

  1. Prepare a jelly with gelatin, adding soup stock and the water from boiling the fish.

  2. Pour the jelly into a mold.

  3. Refrigerate the jelly until set.

  4. Serve the fish on a platter with the jelly around it.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Pickerel
Forms the main body of the dish, providing the mild, flaky fish meat for the filling.
Bread
Soaked in milk and egg, it binds the chopped fish and keeps the filling moist.
Eggs
Bind the moistened bread and fish into a cohesive filling that holds its shape.
Gelatin
Sets the stock and fish-water liquid into a firm jelly around the fish.

The step that matters

Sieving the filling. Passing the mixture through a sieve makes it smooth and fine, so it packs evenly into the skin and holds together without lumps or loose bits when cooked.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, parsley, pepper, butter, gelatin):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, parsley, pepper, butter, gelatin. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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