Bone the herring and cut into small pieces. Slice some cooked potatoes; then butter a baking-dish; sprinkle with flour. Put a layer of potatoes, some chopped onion and herring and bits of butter until dish is full; sprinkle with pepper. Make the top layer of potatoes and bits of butter. Moisten with 3 tablespoonfuls of sour cream. Bake in a moderate oven until brown. Serve hot.
A layered potato-and-fish bake of the sort that turns up across Central Europe under a dozen names. The recipe assumes you know what kind of herring is meant and how salty it will be, so that is where to start.
- Which herringIn a Hungarian context this most likely means salt-cured or pickled herring rather than fresh, though the recipe does not say and the instruction to bone it suggests a whole fish. If using salt herring, soak in cold water or milk for several hours, changing the water once, then taste before assembling; pickled herring in vinegar needs only a rinse and a pat dry.
- Moderate oven350F. The dish is essentially reheating cooked potatoes and cooking through thin pieces of fish, so 35 to 45 minutes is enough to heat it and colour the top.
- No salt in the recipeProbably because the herring supplies it.
- Sprinkle with flourThe buttered dish is dusted with flour the way you would flour a cake tin, which keeps the bottom layer from welding to the dish.
- Three tablespoons of sour creamThat is a bare moistening, not a sauce, and it will read as dry to modern taste. A half cup thinned with a splash of milk, poured over before the final butter, is closer to how rakott krumpli is usually served now.
- OnionRaw chopped onion in thin layers will soften but stay sharp. Softening it in butter first gives a sweeter, more integrated result.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given. Roughly 2 lb cooked potatoes, 3 or 4 herring fillets and one medium onion fills a 9-inch dish and serves four.
- ServingHot, as written, and it wants something acidic alongside — pickled cucumbers or a vinegar-dressed salad cut the richness.
Layered baked potatoes with sour cream — rakott krumpli — is a fixture of Hungarian home cooking, most often built with hard-boiled eggs and sausage; this herring version belongs to the same construction, swapping in a cured fish that would have been cheap and shelf-stable far inland. How closely such dishes matched anything actually eaten in Budapest is another question, but the sour cream and potato foundation is genuine enough, and salt herring travelled through Central Europe from the Baltic trade for centuries before this book was printed.