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To Boil Herrings

A boiled herring dish seasoned with vinegar, salt, horseradish, parsley, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 562 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Boil Herrings

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scale, gut, and wash the herrings.

  2. Dry them and rub with vinegar and coarse sea salt.

  3. Skewer the herrings with their tails in their mouths and place them on a fish plate.

Boil and serve

  1. When the water boils, add the herrings and boil for 10 to 12 minutes.

  2. Drain the herrings over the water, then turn the heads into the middle of the dish.

  3. Serve with scraped horseradish, parsley, and 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. Horseradish + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Herrings
Form the main body of the dish, cooking to a moist, flaky texture.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the mild, oily flavour of the fish.
Horseradish
Provides a pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the fish and butter.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the served fish.

The step that matters

Boiling time. Boiling for too long can toughen and dry out the delicate fish flesh, while too short a time leaves it undercooked near the bone. Timing the boil from when the water returns to a boil keeps the herrings tender and moist throughout.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, parsley, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, parsley, 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.

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