Skip to main content
Main

Pickled Herring

Pickled herring with onion, allspice, bay leaves, and cold vinegar.

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

Why it works: Onion and allspice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,270 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pickled Herring

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herring

  1. Soak the herring overnight.

  2. In the morning, remove the skins and heads, and cut each herring into 3 or 4 pieces.

Pickle

  1. Place the herring in a jar with the sliced onion, allspice, and bay leaves.

  2. Pour cold vinegar over the herring mixture.

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 + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Allspice + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Herring
Forms the main body of the dish, and its oils and flesh carry the pickling flavour.
Cold vinegar
Acidifies and preserves the fish, firming its flesh as it pickles.
Onion
Adds sharp, sweet aroma that mellows during pickling.
Whole allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquid.
Bay leaves
Contributes a subtle herbal aroma to the pickle.

The step that matters

Soaking the herring overnight. Soaking draws out excess salt from cured herring, so the fish tastes balanced rather than overly salty once it is pickled in vinegar.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against allspice, vinegar. 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

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