Name: Red Herrings, Common English Mode
Ingredients: red herrings; boiling water; cold butter; pepper; cayenne

Why it works: Butter and pepper 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 ↓

Red Herrings, Common English Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Pour boiling water over the red herrings and let them soak for at least 30 minutes if they are highly dried.
Cut off the heads and tails, then open the herrings at the back.

Warm and serve

Warm the herrings over a fire or on a grill.
Rub with a bit of cold butter and season with pepper or cayenne if desired, or serve plain.

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.

Butter + peppertop 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

Red herrings: Main ingredient; the cured fish provides the dish's savoury, smoky flavour and firm texture.
Cold butter: Adds richness and a little moisture to the warmed fish, softening its dry surface.

“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.