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Maquereaux a LA Maitre D’hotei

A simple dish of mackerel cooked in butter and seasoned with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and 28,543 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, fish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the mackerel and remove the insides.

  2. Season the fish with salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the mackerel and cook until golden brown on both sides.

  3. Sprinkle 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together28,543 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

Mackerel
Forms the main body of the dish and cooks to a golden, flaky texture.
Butter
Carries heat across the pan and helps the fish brown richly while adding flavour.
Parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma that contrasts with the rich butter and fish.

The step that matters

Cooking the mackerel until golden brown on both sides. Fish is delicate and sticks or breaks if moved too early. Let the surface form a crust, then turn it once. Browning from the butter's milk solids adds flavour, but over-high heat can burn the butter before the fish cooks 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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