Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Fresh Herrings with Mustard Sauce

A boiled herring dish served with a mustard sauce made from anchovy, butter, egg, vinegar, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and fennel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 723 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Fresh Herrings with Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the herrings and soak them in cold water.

  2. In another pan, mix the coarse sea salt with fresh water and add the drained herrings.

  3. In a saucepan, combine 2 quarts of water, 1 pint of vinegar, and 2 oz of salt; bring to a boil.

  4. Gently boil the herrings in the mixture, skimming the surface occasionally.

Make the sauce

  1. Wash, bone, and mince the anchovy.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan, adding a little vinegar, water, and a small dust of flour; stir in the anchovy.

  3. Add the egg and mix well.

  4. Finish the sauce by adding mustard and squeezing in the lemon juice; serve hot.

Serve

  1. Remove the herrings from the pot and place them on a serving dish.

  2. Garnish with boiled fennel and pour the sauce over the herrings.

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. Lemon + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together723 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Mustard + fenneltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together292 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Flour + fenneltop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together455 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Herrings
Form the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the brine-and-vinegar liquid.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the sauce.
Egg
Thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, creamy texture when mixed well.
Flour
Lightly thickens the butter base so the sauce holds together.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth and salt to the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Gently boil the herrings. Vigorous boiling can break the delicate fish apart. A gentle simmer cooks the flesh through while keeping it intact, and skimming removes foam that would cloud the liquid.

Swap the fennel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, anchovy, butter, flour, egg, mustard, lemon):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Fennelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, anchovy, butter, flour, egg, mustard, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes