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Red Herrings to Dress

Red herrings soaked in beer, heated, and coated with cold butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beer and butter work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 680 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Red Herrings to Dress

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the herrings open and soak them in boiling small beer for 30 minutes.

  2. Drain them completely and heat them over a fire until hot.

  3. Rub cold butter over the herrings and serve.

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. Beer + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together680 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Red herrings
Provide the main body and flavor of the dish, and are the base that the beer and butter season.
Small beer
Moistens and flavors the herrings during the soak.
Cold butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished herrings.

The step that matters

Drain them completely before heating. Surface liquid left on the herrings will steam rather than heat through over the fire, and excess moisture dilutes the flavor, so draining well helps the fish heat evenly.

“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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