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Bloaters, Devilled
Pour boiling water over four large bloaters, remove the skin, and split them down the back, cut out the fillets, dry them, and broil over a clear fire for three minutes. Sprinkle with cayenne, lemon juice, and oiled butter mixed together, place on hot buttered toast, and grate a little cheese over. Make very hot in the oven, and serve.
A late-Victorian savoury built on a fish most British fishmongers no longer stock. The technique is sound; the shopping is the hard part.
- What a bloater isA whole herring, ungutted, lightly salted and briefly cold-smoked, so it stays plump and tastes gamier and softer than a kipper. If you cannot find them, a kipper or a hot-smoked herring fillet is the nearest substitute, though a kipper is saltier and drier and needs less broiling.
- The boiling water is not cookingIt is a scalding to loosen the skin and rinse off surface salt and smoke residue. Pour it over, leave a minute at most, then drain and skin. Left to sit, the flesh slackens and falls apart when you try to lift the fillets.
- Dry the fillets properlyThis is the hinge. Wet fillets steam under the grill instead of taking colour, and the butter mixture slides straight off. Blot them firmly between cloths or paper before they go near the heat.
- Broil means grillThree minutes under a hot overhead grill, close to the element, is right for a thin boned fillet that is already cured and smoked and needs little more than colouring through. Longer and it goes dry and stringy.
- Oiled butterButter melted gently until it runs to oil; usually glossed as melted or drawn butter, and often poured off clear of the milky sediment. Ordinary melted butter works.
- Cayenne quantity'Devilled' implies more cayenne than a modern palate expects, and the recipe gives no measure. Start with a scant quarter teaspoon across four fillets and add more once you have tasted; the smoke and salt already carry a lot of flavour.
- The cheese and the ovenA hard grating cheese -- Cheddar or Parmesan -- and only a light dusting, enough to brown. 'Make very hot in the oven' means a short spell in a hot oven to heat through and colour, or simply back under the grill until the cheese blisters.
- YieldFour bloaters give eight fillets: four generous savoury portions at the end of dinner, or two at breakfast or high tea.
Bloaters were the pride of Great Yarmouth, where the autumn herring fishery landed fish in such volume that curing houses worked round the clock; the light, short cure that produced a bloater kept the fish only a few days, which is why they were eaten close to the coast or rushed inland by rail. The name is generally traced to the Scandinavian blöt, meaning soft or soaked, describing a fish cured far less severely than a red herring. "Devilled" dishes — anything hit hard with cayenne, mustard and pepper and browned — were a fixture of the British savoury course and the breakfast sideboard alike, and the taste is often said to have been carried home from India, though the culinary sense of "devil" is recorded in Britain before that association; either way it was applied indiscriminately to bones, kidneys, biscuits and smoked fish. Such a small, sharp, salty mouthful on toast was thought the proper way to finish before the wine.