Skip to main content
Main

Breakfast Herring

A potato cake made with herring, butter, mashed potatoes, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Breakfast Herring

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the herring in a steamer and heat until cooked.

  2. Add a little butter to the herring.

  3. Prepare a dish of well-steamed potatoes.

Make and fry

  1. Chop the herring very finely and mix it with mashed potatoes and a beaten egg.

  2. Fry the mixture in a little butter to form a potato cake.

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 + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Herring
Main protein and flavour, cooked by steaming before being mixed into the cake.
Potatoes
Make up the bulk and give a soft, starchy body that holds the cake together.
Egg
Binds the mixture, as its proteins set when heated and hold the pieces together.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the outside of the cake brown when fried.

The step that matters

Mixing the herring, potatoes and egg before frying. The herring must be chopped very finely and evenly mixed so the cake holds together. Egg proteins set when heated and bind the mixture, so the cake is less likely to fall apart in the pan.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes