Skip to main content
Main

Broiled Herrings

A simple dish of herrings seasoned with salt and pepper, pan‑fried in butter until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and gut the herrings, removing the heads and tails.

  2. Season the fish with salt and pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Place the herrings in the skillet and cook for 3-4 minutes on each side until golden brown.

  3. Serve hot.

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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Herrings
Provide the main fish, which cooks through and turns golden brown in the butter.
Butter
Conducts heat to the fish and helps it brown, adding richness and flavor.

The step that matters

Cooking the herrings on each side. Medium heat and a timed turn let the fish cook through while the surface browns. Too high a heat can scorch the butter and burn the outside before the inside is done.

“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