Soak herrings over night in cold water; remove the milch; cut off the head and skin and cut the herring into small pieces; add 2 apples, 2 pickles, 3 hard-boiled eggs, 1 onion, a few olives, all cut fine. Put into bowl; mash the milch with a little mustard, 1 teaspoonful of sugar, pepper and salt. Add ¼ cupful of vinegar and mix all well together. Garnish with sliced lemon, and serve with boiled potatoes.
A cured-herring salad of the kind sold by the tub in German delicatessens, with the fish's own soft roe used to thicken the dressing. The original assumes you know what a salt herring is and how many you need.
- How many herringsThe recipe never says. The proportions of apple, egg, pickle and onion suit two to three whole salt herrings, giving roughly four servings as a first course.
- Milch means miltThe milch is the soft roe of a male herring, the creamy sac running alongside the backbone. Mashed with mustard and vinegar it emulsifies into a pale, faintly sweet dressing. If your fish are female or already filleted, substitute an extra hard-boiled yolk mashed with a spoonful of sour cream; the texture will be close.
- Buy the right fishThis needs salt-cured herring (schmaltz herring, matjes, or Scandinavian salted herring in brine), not fresh. Buy from a commercial curer; herring cured for eating without cooking is often frozen at some stage to kill parasites, though practice varies by producer and country, so it is worth checking. Fresh herring cured overnight at home is a different and riskier proposition.
- The overnight soakCold water, changed two or three times, draws out the salt. Milk is the common alternative and gives a milder result. Taste a sliver before dressing the salad; heavily salted barrel herring may want a full 24 hours, matjes fillets an hour or less.
- PicklesSour dill cucumbers or German Salzgurken, not sweet gherkins. Sweet pickle throws the balance, since the dressing already carries a teaspoon of sugar.
- VinegarHousehold vinegar of the period was not standardised in strength, but ordinary cider or white wine vinegar is a reasonable stand-in for the quarter cupful called for. Add it gradually into the mashed milt rather than all at once, or the dressing may separate.
- Let it standThe salad is better after two to four hours in the refrigerator, which lets the apple and onion soften and the dressing soak through. It keeps two days, covered.
- ServingPlain boiled potatoes, waxy ones for preference, are good served warm against the cold, sharp salad. Rye bread and butter does the same job.
Heringssalat belongs to the long northern European economy of the salt herring, the cheap barrelled protein that fed the Baltic and North Sea coasts for centuries and underwrote the wealth of the Hanseatic towns. In German households it was a fixture of Lent and of the days after heavy feasting, New Year's Day especially, when something sour and cold was wanted; many regional versions add cooked beetroot, which turns the whole bowl magenta, and this one's omission of it is worth noting. The use of the milt as a thickener is the old thrift of the dish showing through, since nothing from a barrel fish was thrown away. Its appearance in a book that assigns a nation to each day of the year reflects how firmly herring salad was identified with German cooking in American eyes around the turn of the twentieth century, a period in which German delicatessens are often said to have been a common feature of urban life.