Soak the herring over night; remove the milch and mash fine. Cut off the head, skin and bone; chop the herring; add chopped apples, pickles, potatoes, olives and capers. Put in the salad bowl; then add the yolk of a hard-boiled egg to the mashed milch, mustard, 1 teaspoonful of sugar mixed with ¼ cup of vinegar and a little lemon-juice, salt and pepper. Pour the sauce over the salad and garnish with olives and sliced lemon.
A salt-herring salad written for cooks who bought their fish from a barrel and needed no quantities. The proportions are yours to set; what matters is the soaking and the milt.
- "Milch" is miltThe milch (German Milch, milt) is the soft roe of the male fish, and it is the thickening agent for the dressing here. If you can only find roeless or filleted herring, the sauce will be thin; a mashed hard-boiled yolk or two extra will carry it, though the flavour is not the same.
- What kind of herringThis means whole salt-cured herring, not the sweet pickled herring sold in jars. A Northern or Eastern European grocer is the likeliest source, where it is sold as salted herring; matjes is a milder cure and is usually sold as fillets, so it will not give you the milt.
- The overnight soakSoak in plenty of cold water in the refrigerator, changing the water two or three times. Twelve hours suits a heavily salted fish; taste a corner of the flesh before you commit, because under-soaked herring will overwhelm everything else in the bowl. Milk instead of water gives a milder result.
- Unstated quantitiesA workable ratio for two large herring is about 2 cups diced boiled waxy potatoes, 1 tart apple, 2 medium pickled cucumbers, and a few tablespoons each of olives and capers. Everything should be cut to roughly the same small dice.
- The mustard is unmeasuredThe original gives no amount. Start with 1 to 2 teaspoons of a sharp German or Dijon mustard, whisked into the mashed milt and yolk before the vinegar goes in, then adjust.
- Vinegar and sugarA quarter cup of vinegar is a good deal of liquid for a bowl this size. Add it gradually into the milt-and-yolk paste as you would build a mayonnaise, stopping when the sauce coats a spoon; leftover vinegar is no loss.
- Salt last, if at allHerring, pickles, olives and capers are all salted. Season the dressing only after mixing and tasting.
- Rest before servingCover and chill at least two hours, preferably overnight, so the potato and apple take up the dressing. On the quantities suggested above it serves four to six as a first course or supper dish, with dark rye bread.
Herring salad of this kind is a fixture of northern German and Baltic cooking, where barrelled salt herring was the cheapest reliable protein of the winter months and appeared on the cold table alongside pickles, potatoes and rye bread. The pattern of the dish — cured fish cut small, bound with a sharp mustard-and-vinegar dressing, stretched with root vegetables and fruit — is shared with Scandinavian sillsalad and the Russian and Polish herring salads that use beetroot for colour. Using the milt to thicken the sauce is the detail that marks it as an older, thriftier recipe: nothing of the fish is discarded, and the roe does the work that oil or cream would do in a later kitchen.