Skip to main content
Main

Pickled Meats

A smoked herring stuffed with butter, mustard, roe, paprika, and cayenne, then broiled and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,588 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Pickled Meats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the head and tail from the bloater and remove the bones.

Fill and season

  1. Mix the butter and mustard, then spread it inside the bloater.

  2. Place one roe over the butter mixture and close the bloater.

  3. Brush the outside with warm butter and dust with paprika and a pinch of cayenne.

Broil and serve

  1. Broil for about 5 minutes.

  2. Garnish with parsley and serve hot.

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. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Roe + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together243 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + roetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Bloater (smoked herring)
Provides the main fish body and smoky flavour that the dish is built around.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the fish brown under the broiler.
Mustard
Adds sharp, acidic bite that cuts through the richness of the fish and butter.
Roe (fish egg)
Adds richness and a briny, savoury flavour inside the fish.

The step that matters

Broil for about 5 minutes. Broiling is brief and intense, so the fish can dry out or scorch quickly. Watching the surface lets butter brown and paprika toast without overcooking the flesh.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, roe, fish, egg, parsley):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, roe, fish, egg, parsley. 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.

You might also like

Fried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipesBroiled FishBroiled Fish68 recipes