Skip to main content
Main

Boiling Fish

A boiled mackerel served with parsley and fennel sauce or buttered roe.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and fennel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 625 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Boiling Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the mackerel thoroughly, then soak it in saltwater for 5 minutes.

Boil

  1. Place it in a fish kettle with cold water, barely covering it, and bring to a boil.

  2. Skim the surface.

  3. Cover and simmer gently for 2 to 5 minutes.

  4. Check for doneness by pulling the fins; if they come off easily and the eyes turn white, remove the fish.

Finish and serve

  1. Slit the mackerel open and remove the thin black skin inside.

  2. Serve with parsley and fennel sauce or a sauce made from boiled and mashed soft roes mixed with melted butter.

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 + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

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

  3. Fennel + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together168 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Sauce + roetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Roe + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mackerel
Is the main protein; gently poaching it keeps the flesh moist and tender.
Soft roes
Mashed and mixed with butter, they give the optional sauce richness and body.
Butter
Melted into the roe sauce, it adds richness and a smooth, silky texture.

The step that matters

Simmer gently. A hard boil toughens and breaks up delicate fish flesh. Keeping the water barely simmering cooks the fish evenly and keeps it moist and intact.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, fennel, sauce, roe, butter):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, fennel, sauce, roe, butter. 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.

More boiled mackerel recipes

Fillets 13 See all 72 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes