Herring Salad
Soak over night three Holland herrings cut in very small pieces; cook and peel eight medium potatoes, and when cold chop with two small cooked red beets, two onions, a few sour apples, some roasted veal, and three hard-boiled eggs; mix with a sauce of sweet-oil, vinegar, stock, pepper, and mustard to taste. A table-spoon of thick sour cream improves the sauce, which should stand over night in an earthen dish. - Mrs. H. C. Mahncke.
A German-style herring salad from a book full of Ohio's German households. Everything here is either cured, cooked or raw-and-crisp, so the work is in the soaking and the resting rather than at the stove.
- Holland herringsThese are whole salt-cured herring packed in barrels, the same family of product as what is now sold as matjes or schmaltz herring, though those are distinct cures. Three of them should yield roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of boned flesh. Jarred herring in plain brine can stand in, but taste it first: modern products are usually far less salty and may need little or no soaking.
- Soak in the refrigeratorThe overnight soak is to draw out salt, not to preserve anything. Do it in cold water in the refrigerator, changing the water once or twice, then drain and pat dry before chopping.
- Sweet-oilNineteenth-century shorthand for olive oil, usually a mild one. A neutral oil works if you want the vinegar and mustard forward.
- Proportions for the dressingNone are given. A working ratio is about 1/3 cup oil to 3 tablespoons vinegar and 2 to 3 tablespoons stock, with mustard and pepper to taste. Add no salt until the herring is in and tasted.
- Roasted vealThis assumes cold roast meat already in the larder. Any cold cooked meat serves — leftover pork loin, roast chicken or beef — cut in the same small dice as the potatoes, say about 1/2 lb.
- Sour applesA firm tart variety: Granny Smith, Braeburn, or a russet type. "A few" means one or two medium apples; more than that and the salad turns into a slaw.
- The earthen dish mattersVinegar and beet juice both react with bare metal, and the original cook had earthenware for the purpose. Use glass, glazed ceramic or stainless, cover it, and rest it overnight in the refrigerator — the beets bleed through and the whole salad comes out rose-pink.
- Sour creamFull-fat sour cream, stirred in at the end rather than cooked. Modern light versions break in an acidic dressing.
- Yield and servingEight potatoes plus meat and fish makes a great deal — enough for 8 to 10 as a first course or supper dish. Serve cold on lettuce, with dark rye bread.
Herring salad of this kind is a German and Dutch-Baltic dish, Heringssalat, close kin to Swedish sillsallad and the Russian herring-and-beet preparations; the beets, apple and pickled fish appear in versions all around the herring-fishing coasts of northern Europe. "Holland herring" was a trade name rather than a species: Dutch curers had dominated the barrel-salted herring business since the late Middle Ages, and by the 1870s the salted fish reached inland American cities cheaply enough that it may well have been common in German-immigrant kitchens, though that is an inference from the cheapness of the trade rather than a documented pattern of consumption. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and the contributor's name here signals exactly that community han knknew what a barrel herring tasted like and needed only the proportions. The instruction to let it stand overnight is the real technique: a day in the dressing is what turns a bowl of chopped leftovers into one coherent, faintly pink dish.