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Baked Herrings Cold Fish

Baked herring served cold with a butter‑flour sauce and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Baked Herrings Cold Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the herring

  1. Place the herring fillets in a saucepan and cover with water.

  2. Add parsley, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Boil for 15 minutes.

  4. Remove the herring and set aside.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In the same pan, mix flour and butter to thicken the sauce.

  2. Serve the herring in a dish with toasted bread around the edges.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Herring fillets
The main protein, which firms and turns flaky when gently simmered in water.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot cooking liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing flour and butter to thicken the sauce. Flour clumps if it meets liquid unevenly. Mixing it thoroughly with the butter, then stirring it into the hot liquid, lets the starch disperse and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

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