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Grilled Herrings

Grilled herrings served with a butter, flour, vinegar, mustard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley 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 ↓

Grilled Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scale and wash the herrings, then dry them.

Grill and make the sauce

  1. Place the herrings on a grill to cook.

  2. In a saucepan, combine butter, flour, vinegar, French mustard, water, ordinary mustard, pepper, and salt.

  3. Heat the mixture, stirring until smooth and thickened.

  4. Boil for five minutes, then pour the sauce over the grilled fish.

Serve

  1. Garnish with parsley before serving.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Herrings
The main fish, whose oily flesh cooks on the grill and carries the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
French mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the fish and butter.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the butter.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce as it heats. Flour thickens only when heated with constant stirring; if left still, it can lump or scorch before the sauce turns smooth.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

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