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Boiled Mackerel with Walnut Sauce

A boiled mackerel served with a walnut and oil sauce, garnished with olives and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Mackerel with Walnut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean and trim the mackerel.

  2. Place it in a fish kettle with enough water to cover and ½ cup of coarse sea salt.

  3. Boil gently until cooked, then carefully remove and let cool.

Make the walnut sauce

  1. Peel the kernels of the walnuts and pound them to a smooth paste in a mortar.

  2. Soak the crumb of the stale roll in milk until absorbed, then mix it with the pounded walnuts.

  3. Gradually mix in 1 teacup of Lucca oil and the lemon juice, then season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Lay the fish on a dish, spread the sauce over it, and garnish with olives and lemon slices.

  2. Chill on ice until ready to serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Walnut + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + olivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

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

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 gently by boiling until it is firm and flaky.
Walnuts
Pounded into a paste, they give the sauce its body, richness and nutty flavour.
Stale penny roll
Its soaked crumb thickens the sauce and helps bind the walnut paste smoothly.
Milk
Softens the bread crumb so it blends into the walnut paste evenly.
Lucca oil
Gradually emulsified into the paste, it adds fat, silkiness and a smooth, rich texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fattiness.

The step that matters

Boil gently until cooked. Boiling too hard can break up the delicate flesh and leave it dry or ragged, so a gentle simmer keeps the fish moist and intact.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, lemon, pepper, olive):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Milletfits about as well
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, pepper, olive. 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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