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An Excellent Herring Salad

A salad of split herring, beetroot, potatoes, pickled gherkins, apples, eggs, and a sauce of egg yolk, oil, vinegar, and sour cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 330 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

An Excellent Herring Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herring

  1. Soak, skin, split, and bone the herring.

  2. Lay the two sides on a dish and slice them sloppily.

Assemble the salad

  1. Arrange slices of beetroot, cold boiled potatoes, and pickled gherkins over the fish.

  2. Add chopped apples and minced yolks and whites of hard-boiled eggs in small heaps of contrasting colors.

  3. Garnish with curled celery leaves or parsley around the bowl.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, rub the yolk of one hard-boiled egg smooth with salt.

  2. Add oil and vinegar as for a regular salad, then mix in the sour cream.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Beetroot + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together330 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Beetroot + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,047 recipes

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

  4. Apple + celerytop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Beetroot + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Herring
Forms the main body of the salad and provides its savoury, rich flavour.
Beetroot
Adds earthy sweetness and a vivid colour to the salad.
Potatoes
Add bulk and a soft, starchy texture that balances the fish.
Apples
Add sharp acidity and crisp texture that cut through the richness of the fish.
Sour cream
Adds fat and creaminess, giving the dressing a smooth, tangy body.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness; the yolks are mashed into the sauce to make it smooth and thick.

The step that matters

Rubbing the egg yolk smooth with salt. Salt helps break down the dry, crumbly yolk into a paste, so it blends evenly into the oil and vinegar. Lumps left in the yolk will stay in the dressing.

Flavor stand-ins for the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, potato, egg, celery, vinegar, cream):

  1. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  2. Lemonbetter flavor fit
  3. Limebetter flavor fit
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, potato, egg, celery, vinegar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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