Skip to main content
Salad

An Excellent Herring Salad

A salad of herring, beetroot, potatoes, pickled gherkins, apples, eggs, and sour cream dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beetroot and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 330 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

An Excellent Herring Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herring

  1. Soak the herring.

  2. Skin the herring.

  3. Split the herring.

  4. Bone the herring.

  5. Lay the two sides on a dish.

  6. Slice the sides slopingly.

Assemble the salad

  1. Arrange slices of beetroot, cold boiled potatoes, and pickled gherkins over the fish.

  2. Add chopped apples.

  3. Mince yolks and whites of hard-boiled eggs.

  4. Place the minced yolks and whites in small heaps.

  5. Garnish with curled celery leaves or parsley around the bowl.

Make the dressing

  1. Rub the yolk of one hard-boiled egg with salt until smooth.

  2. Add oil and vinegar.

  3. Dilute with thick sour cream.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Beetroot + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together330 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Beetroot + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,047 recipes

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

  4. Apple + celerytop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Beetroot + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Herring
Provides the main fish flavour and the body of the salad.
Beetroot
Adds colour and an earthy sweetness to the salad.
Cold boiled potatoes
Add starchy bulk that holds the salad together and absorbs the dressing.
Apples
Add tart freshness that balances the richness of the fish and dressing.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft texture, with the yolk forming the base of the dressing.
Sour cream
Adds creaminess and tang that softens the dressing.

The step that matters

Rub the yolk with salt until smooth. Salt draws moisture and helps break down the yolk into a smooth paste. Lumps left here will carry into the dressing and make it grainy, so the yolk should be fully worked before oil and vinegar are added.

Flavor stand-ins for the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, potato, egg, celery, vinegar, cream):

  1. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  2. Lemonbetter flavor fit
  3. Limebetter flavor fit
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, potato, egg, celery, vinegar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

More herring salad recipes

Swedish 6 See all 41 →

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes