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Baked Mackerel

Baked Mackerel is a fish dish baked with forcemeat stuffing, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the fish and remove the roe.

  2. Fill the fish with forcemeat and sew up the slit.

  3. Flour the fish and place them in a dish, alternating heads and tails, with the roe in between.

Bake and serve

  1. Add small pieces of butter, pepper, and salt between each layer.

  2. Bake for 1 hour.

  3. Serve with melted butter or maitre d’hôtel sauce.

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. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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 provides the flesh that cooks through in the oven.
Forcemeat
Fills the fish with a soft, seasoned stuffing that adds moisture and flavour as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the fish moist in the oven and enriches its flavour.

The step that matters

Bake for 1 hour. Mackerel is an oily fish that dries out quickly in dry heat. Layering butter between the fish and keeping the stuffing moist helps protect the flesh, while the bake must be long enough to cook the thick fish through to the bone.

“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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