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Fried Herrings

A fried herring seasoned with pepper and salt, coated in flour, and cooked in boiling dripping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and wipe the herring.

  2. Lightly season with pepper and salt.

  3. Dust the herring with flour.

Fry and drain

  1. Heat sufficient boiling dripping in a frying pan to cover the herring.

  2. Fry the herring for 7 to 10 minutes, depending on its size.

  3. Remove the herring and place it on a dish to drain excess fat for a minute or two.

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. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms a light coating that crisps during frying and helps the surface brown.
Herring
Provides the main body of the dish, cooking through in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Fry the herring for 7 to 10 minutes, depending on its size. The fat must be hot enough before the fish goes in. If it is too cool, the flour coating absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisp, and the fish cooks unevenly. Size changes the time needed for the centre to cook through.

“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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