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Broiled Herrings

Broiled herrings served with a sauce of butter, flour, mustard, and beer or ale.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Broiled Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herrings

  1. Scale and gut the herrings, then cut off the heads.

  2. Wash the herrings clean and dry them with a cloth.

  3. Flour the herrings and broil them.

Make the sauce

  1. Mash the heads and boil them in small beer or ale with whole pepper and an onion for 15 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture, then thicken it with butter, flour, and mustard.

Serve

  1. Place the broiled herrings on a dish and serve the sauce in a separate boat.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beer + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together314 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Herrings
Form the main dish, providing the flesh that is floured and broiled.
Flour
Coats the herrings and thickens the sauce, giving body to both.
Small beer or ale
Liquid that carries the flavour of the pepper and onion into the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the thickened sauce a smooth, rounded texture.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Thicken the strained sauce with butter, flour, and mustard. Flour must be cooked into the butter and liquid, or the sauce stays pasty and tastes raw. Mustard added at the end keeps its sharpness, since prolonged boiling dulls it.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beer, pepper, butter, mustard):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beer, pepper, butter, mustard. 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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