Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Salt Mackerel

A boiled mackerel seasoned with salt, pepper, and optional aromatics, served with a horseradish cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Salt Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the head, tail, and fins from the mackerel, then wash it thoroughly.

  2. Soak the mackerel in water, skin-side up, for 12 hours.

  3. Place the mackerel in a large pot of cold water, skin-side up, and bring to a boil for a few moments.

  4. Drain the water and slide the mackerel onto a hot platter, then remove the backbone.

  5. For added flavor, cook with a bay leaf, sliced onion, and lemon juice in the water.

Make the sauce

  1. To make the sauce, combine thin cream, butter, and egg yolk in a pot, then add grated horseradish and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Sprinkle the mackerel with pepper and butter, and add sliced hard-boiled eggs if desired.

  2. Serve the sauce hot over the mackerel.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 in water until flaky.
Thin cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mild body to the sauce.
Egg yolk
Thickens the cream sauce as it heats and gives it a silky texture.
Grated horseradish
Provides sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the fish and cream.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded flavor to the sauce and the finished fish.

The step that matters

Combining the sauce and bringing it to a boil. Egg yolk can scramble if it gets too hot or boils too hard, leaving the sauce grainy. Heating it gently while stirring keeps the cream sauce smooth and thickened.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, egg, lemon, cream, horseradish):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, egg, lemon, cream, horseradish. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesHorseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes