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Salad

An Excellent Herring Salad

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

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, and split the herring, then lay the two sides on a dish.

  2. Slice the herring sloppily.

Arrange 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 for decoration.

  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 to the egg yolk, then dilute with thick 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, fishy flavour.
Beetroot
Adds earthy sweetness and the vivid red colour of the salad.
Potatoes
Give the salad bulk and a soft, starchy base for the fish.
Apples
Add tart crispness that cuts through the richness of the fish and sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are mashed into the sauce for body; whites and minced pieces add texture.
Sour cream
Adds creamy richness and mild acidity to the dressing.

The step that matters

Rubbing the egg yolk smooth with salt. Yolk must be worked into a smooth paste before oil and vinegar are added; lumps left in the yolk will not disperse evenly and make the sauce grainy.

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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