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Baked Herring

Baked herring is a fish dish prepared by baking cleaned herrings with vinegar, water, peppercorns, mace, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,415 recipes. The science ↓

Baked Herring

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the herrings

  1. Clean and dry the herrings.

  2. Cut off the heads, tails, and fins.

  3. Make a cut from the opening down to the tail.

  4. Lay the herrings on their backs and remove the bones.

  5. Sprinkle salt over the fish.

  6. Roll the fish up starting from the tail end.

Bake

  1. Place the rolled herrings in a small pie dish with peppercorns and mace.

  2. Pour enough vinegar and water to cover the fish.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 45 minutes.

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. Vinegar + macetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,415 recipes

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, becoming tender and flaky when baked.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the fish a sharp, tangy flavour and helps firm its flesh.
Water
Dilutes the vinegar and keeps the fish moist during baking.

The step that matters

Pour enough vinegar and water to cover the fish. If the fish is not fully covered, the exposed parts can dry out and toughen in the oven, while the covered portions absorb the acidic liquid and flavour 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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