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Baked Herrings

Baked herrings with roes, pepper, salt, flour, and water, baked slowly until done.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Roe and flour work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 177 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓

Baked Herrings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut off the heads of the herrings, open and clean them.

  2. Press the backbone with your fingers and draw it out.

  3. Sprinkle the herrings with pepper, salt, and flour.

  4. Lay the roes on the herrings and roll them up tightly with the skin outwards.

Bake

  1. Pack the herrings closely in an earthenware pot with a cover.

  2. Add a small quantity of water and bake slowly at 300°F (150°C) for two hours or until well done.

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. Roe + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together177 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Roe + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Herrings with soft roes
Provide the main body and the soft roes, which set and turn creamy during slow baking.
Flour
Lightly coats the fish, helping the surface brown and the seasoning cling.
Water
Creates steam in the covered pot, keeping the fish moist during the long bake.

The step that matters

Bake slowly with the lid on. Slow, covered baking at a low temperature cooks the herring through and softens the bones while keeping the flesh moist. Too much heat or too little water can dry the fish and toughen the roe.

“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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