Soak 1 dozen herring over night in water; then mash the milch and roes and mix with 4 tablespoonfuls of brown sugar. Put the herring in a large dish with 2 large onions sliced; make alternate layers of herring, onions and sliced lemon, 8 bay-leaves, a few cloves, whole peppers and some mustard seed. Pour over all some vinegar. Ready to serve in five hours. Will keep for one week. Serve with boiled potatoes.
This is a cold vinegar marinade for uncooked fish, with no heat step, no measured brine strength and a week of unrefrigerated keeping. The chemistry it relies on is not reliable, and it should not be reproduced from this text.
- "Milch" is miltThe word is the soft roe — the male herring's sperm sac — mashed with the hard roe and sugar to thicken the marinade. Both are being eaten raw here, and neither is inspected or cooked at any point.
- No heat step at allNothing in this recipe reaches a safe temperature. Vinegar and salt slow bacterial growth but do not reliably kill the parasitic nematodes (Anisakis and relatives) found in herring; modern practice for cold-cured herring normally relies on a controlled freezing step that this book predates.
- Five hours is not a cureEven where a strong acid cure does eventually firm and preserve the flesh, five hours at room temperature is a flavouring soak, not a preservation. The fish leaves the dish essentially raw.
- The vinegar is unmeasured"Some vinegar" gives no volume and no acidity. Safe acid pickling depends on a known concentration reaching a known pH throughout the fish, and this instruction cannot deliver that even in principle.
- Salt herring assumedThe overnight soak only makes sense for heavily salt-cured barrel herring, which the original cook bought already brined to a strength no one recorded. Fresh supermarket herring soaked overnight in water is simply wet raw fish, which is worse.
- "Will keep for one week"That claim assumes a cold larder and a salt load the recipe never quantifies. Held at modern room temperature for a week, this is a spoilage risk on top of the parasite risk.
- If you want the dishBuy commercially cured or frozen-then-pickled herring, or follow a current pickled-herring recipe that specifies vinegar strength, salt percentage and freezing. The onion, lemon, bay, clove, peppercorn and mustard-seed layering with boiled potatoes is the part worth keeping.
Salted herring was one of the great bulk foods of northern Europe, packed in barrels in the North Sea and Baltic fisheries and shipped inland by the ton, and in Russia it became the classic zakuska — the salt, sharp, vinegar-cut mouthful eaten alongside vodka and boiled potatoes. The overnight soak in fresh water is the giveaway that this began as preserved fish rather than fresh: the cook's first job was pulling salt back out. Mashing the milt and roe with sugar into the marinade is often described as an old northern trick, giving the liquid body and a faint creaminess, and milt does appear in northern herring preparations, though how far back the practice runs is uncertain. Books of this kind, arranging one dish per day of the year and labelling each with a nation, were selling a sort of armchair cosmopolitanism to American households; "Russian" here means little more than herring, bay leaf and vinegar, but the dish behind the label is real enough.