Name: Modern Cookery
Ingredients: fresh Yarmouth bloaters; cold butter; pepper; cayenne

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

fresh Yarmouth bloaters
cold butter
pepper
cayenne

Directions

Prepare

Soak the bloaters for 30 minutes if they are highly dried.
Cut off the heads and tails of the herrings.
Open the herrings at the back.

Cook and serve

Warm the herrings through on a grill or in a pan.
Rub with cold butter and season with pepper or cayenne if desired.

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.

Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh yarmouth bloaters: Cured herring form the dish is built around, providing the main flavour and body.
Cold butter: Melts over the warm fish, adding richness and moisture to the flesh.

“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.