Soak 3 Dutch herrings in milk; then cut off the heads and tails and cut herrings into one-half inch pieces. Add 2 apples cut fine, 2 hard-boiled eggs sliced thin, some cooked beets cut fine, some celery and green onions cut into very small pieces. Season and mix together. Pour over some vinaigrette sauce, and sprinkle with chopped gherkins.
A cold composed salad of salt herring, apple, beet and egg — the ancestor of what Dutch and German cooks still call huzarensalade. The soak is the part that matters; everything else is knife work.
- "Dutch herrings" means salt-cured, not freshThese are whole herring packed in brine or dry salt, sold in barrels or jars at Dutch, German, Polish and Scandinavian shops. Look for zoute haring, matjes, or plain salt herring fillets. Fresh or smoked herring will not behave the same way and needs no soaking.
- The soak is the hingeBarrel-salted herring is aggressively salty and needs 6 to 12 hours in milk, refrigerated, with a change of milk halfway. Taste a sliver before you commit: if it still stings, keep soaking. Pre-filleted jarred herring in brine may need only an hour or two.
- BoningThe recipe says only heads and tails, but a whole salt herring also needs the backbone and the belly skin pulled off. Split it along the spine after soaking, lift out the frame, and strip the skin from the tail end — it comes away in one piece.
- BeetsCooked beets bleed. If you want the salad pink throughout, mix them in early; if you want the apple and egg to stay pale, fold them in at the last moment or serve them on top.
- "Season"Assume black pepper and very little or no salt — the herring supplies it. A spoonful of the vinaigrette mustard, or a little sour cream stirred through, will steady the sharpness.
- Vinaigrette sauceThis means a made dressing of oil and vinegar with mustard, pepper and often chopped herbs or capers, not a bottled dressing; proportions varied. Dress it lightly; the apple and beet already carry moisture.
- Yield and restingThree herrings will probably serve about four as a first course. It improves after an hour in the refrigerator and is best eaten the same day; by day two the apple has gone soft and the whole thing is uniformly magenta.
- ServingCold, with dark rye or pumpernickel and butter. Beer or genever rather than wine.
Salt herring was the currency of the North Sea: the Dutch fishery, with its practice of gutting and barrel-salting the catch at sea, underpinned Amsterdam's wealth from the fifteenth century onward, and cured herring travelled inland across Europe where fresh fish could not. A cold salad of soaked herring with root vegetables, apple and egg is standard household food across the Netherlands and northern Germany, and survives as haringsalade and Heringssalat; the beet-and-apple combination is often traced to the need to soften salt fish with sweetness and acid rather than to any single kitchen. Its appearance here, in a book that assigns one dish per day from one nation after another, tells you what an American cook of the period was expected to recognise as characteristically Dutch.