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Pickled Herrings

A pickled herring dish prepared by boiling, seasoning, frying, and preserving in vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the herrings well and boil them.

  2. Cut each herring into four or five pieces.

  3. Mix the pepper, nutmegs, mace, cloves, and salt together.

  4. Rub the spice mixture into each piece of fish.

  5. Fry the fish in clarified dripping or goose oil until cooked.

  6. Let the fried fish cool.

Pickle and store

  1. Place the fish in a stone jar and cover with vinegar.

  2. Optionally, pour oil on top to exclude air.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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, carrying the spice and vinegar flavour.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the fish and gives the pickle its sharp taste.
Black pepper
Adds pungent heat and aroma that penetrates the fish with the other spices.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic flavour to the spice coating.
Cloves
Add strong, sweet-spiced aroma to the spice mixture.

The step that matters

Let the fried fish cool before covering with vinegar. Placing hot fish in vinegar can soften its flesh and cause it to break apart, and warm fish can make the pickle spoil faster. Cooling first keeps the texture firm and the brine stable.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, nutmeg, clove, vinegar):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, nutmeg, clove, vinegar. 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.

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