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To Broil Herrings

Broiled herring served with a sauce of beer, pepper, onion, butter, flour, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

To Broil Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herring

  1. Cut off the heads of the herring and wash them clean.

  2. Dry the herring with a cloth and coat them in flour.

Make the sauce

  1. Mash the heads and boil them in small beer or ale with whole pepper and onion for 30 minutes.

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

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the herring until cooked through.

  2. Serve the herring on a dish.

  3. Pour the sauce into a bowl, or serve with melted butter and mustard.

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. Mustard + beertop 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

Herring
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by broiling.
Flour
Coats the fish to help it brown and gives the sauce body when mixed with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and, melted into the sauce with flour, gives it a smooth texture.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the butter.
Small beer or ale
Liquid that extracts flavour from the fish heads for the sauce base.

The step that matters

Broil the herring until cooked through. Broiling is fast, high heat, so fish can dry out or burn on the outside before the centre is cooked. Flouring helps the surface brown evenly while the flesh stays moist.

Swap the onion

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

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

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