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To Broil Herrings

A dish of herring broiled and served with a sauce made from the fish heads, beer, pepper, onion, butter, flour, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Broil Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herring

  1. Cut off the heads of the herring.

  2. Wash the heads clean.

  3. Dry the herring with a cloth.

  4. Flour the herring and season with coarse sea salt.

Cook the fish and sauce

  1. Broil the herring until cooked through.

  2. Mash the heads in a pot.

  3. Boil the mashed heads in small beer or ale with whole pepper and onion for 15 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture.

  5. Thicken the strained mixture with butter and flour, adding a good amount of mustard.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish on a dish.

  2. Pour the sauce into a separate bowl, or serve with melted butter and mustard.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beer + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together314 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Herring
Is the main fish, cooked through by broiling to become tender and flaky.
Flour
Coats the fish and thickens the sauce with butter, giving it body.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and helps thicken it with flour.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts the richness of the butter sauce.
Small beer or ale
Liquid that extracts flavour from the mashed heads to form the sauce base.

The step that matters

Thicken the strained mixture with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked into the butter and liquid to avoid a raw, lumpy taste and to thicken evenly into a smooth sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beer, pepper, butter, mustard):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beer, pepper, butter, mustard. 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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