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Bloater Toast

A toast topped with a mixture of grilled herring, butter, egg, and roes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Roe and egg work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 243 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bloater Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the roes from the bloaters.

  2. Grill the herrings, then remove the skin and bones.

  3. Chop the fish and rub it through a fine sieve.

Make the fish mixture

  1. Heat 2 oz of butter in a small saucepan, add the fish.

  2. When hot, stir in the egg and season to taste, cooking until thickened.

Fry the roes and serve

  1. Divide the roes into 8 pieces and fry them in the remaining butter.

  2. Spread the fish mixture on the toast, top with the fried roes, and 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. Roe + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together243 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Roe + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bloaters
Provide the main flavour and the soft roes that are fried as a topping.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when cooking the fish and frying the roes.
Egg
Thickens the warm fish mixture as it cooks, giving it a spreadable texture.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg. Egg proteins set when heated, so the mixture thickens only gently over low heat. If it gets too hot, the egg can scramble and the spread turns grainy instead of smooth.

“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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