Home › The Principles of Cookery › Herrings, Fresh, Boiled
Herrings, Fresh, Boiled
Few fish are more delicious than fresh herrings boiled. Wash, scale, and gut them, sprinkle a little salt over them, and dip them once quickly in vinegar; skewer them securely with their tails in their mouths, put them into boiling water, and simmer very gently until done enough, when they must be taken out immediately. Drain the water from them, and arrange them neatly on a dish; garnish with parsley or scraped horse-radish, and send shrimp, anchovy, or parsley sauce to table in a tureen. Time, about twelve minutes to simmer. Probable cost, 1d. or 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient, half a dozen for three persons.
A plain poached herring, and the whole thing turns on how briefly it sits in the water. The instruction to lift them out the moment they are done is the recipe's real point.
- Twelve minutes is too longTwelve minutes is longer than modern practice — herring of a pound or under are cooked through in about 5-7 minutes at a bare simmer, the flesh parting cleanly from the backbone. Past that point herring flake apart and lose their oil into the water.
- Barely a simmerA rolling boil tears the skin and breaks the fish. Bring the water to the boil, slide the herrings in, then drop the heat so the surface only trembles. A wide sauté pan or fish kettle beats a deep pot.
- The vinegar dipThe quick dip in vinegar is usually explained as firming the skin so it holds together during poaching. One pass in and out is all the recipe asks for; a long soak would start to cure the flesh.
- Tails in mouthsCurling the fish and skewering tail to mouth was as much presentation as function, though it does keep the fish compact. A wooden cocktail stick works; skip it entirely and lay them straight if you would rather.
- Scaling and guttingHerring scales are loose and fly everywhere, so scale under running water or in a sink of water. The roe, soft or hard, is worth keeping and can go back inside the fish or be poached alongside.
- The saucesParsley sauce is a béchamel with chopped parsley; anchovy sauce the same base with anchovy essence or mashed fillets; shrimp sauce with small peeled brown shrimp folded in. Any of the three carries the fish, which needs something to cut its richness. Mustard sauce, the usual Northern European pairing, does the same job.
- Yield and costSix fish for three people is generous by modern standards; two herring each is a full main course, one each with bread and potatoes for a lighter meal. The penny-ha'penny price puts them among the cheapest fish on the slab.
Herring were the great cheap protein of the British and Northern European table, landed in enormous quantities from the North Sea and sold fresh near the coast, salted or smoked everywhere else — kippers, bloaters and red herrings all began as ways of moving the glut inland. That the book quotes a price of a penny or three-halfpence each shows how far down the scale the fresh fish sat: a household that could barely afford meat could afford herring. Boiling, or more properly poaching, was the treatment for the freshest fish, where the point was to do as little as possible; the vinegar dip and the tail-in-mouth curl are both kitchen conventions of the period. The stocks that supported this abundance collapsed in the twentieth century under industrial fishing, and while North Sea herring have since recovered under quota, they are no longer the everyday fish they were when this book was written.