Skip to main content
Main

Fresh Mackerel

Fresh mackerel cooked in water, served with a parsley butter sauce and stewed gooseberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fresh Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Roll the cleaned mackerel in a clean cloth.

  2. Soak the mackerel in cold water.

Cook and make the sauce

  1. Bring water to a boil and cook the mackerel for five minutes.

  2. For the parsley sauce, mix the flour with cold milk until smooth.

  3. Add the butter to the flour mixture and heat until thickened.

Serve

  1. Garnish the dish with green parsley.

  2. Serve with stewed gooseberries.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh mackerel
Forms the main body of the dish and supplies the flesh that is cooked and served.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when heated with it.
Cold milk
Forms the liquid base of the parsley sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with cold milk until smooth. Starch granules clump if they meet heat before being dispersed in cold liquid. Mixing until smooth first lets the starch hydrate evenly, so the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, butter, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, butter, egg. 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 fresh mackerel recipes

Boiled 4 See all 3 →

You might also like

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