Home › The Principles of Cookery › HERRINGS, FRESH, BROILED (in the Scotch style)
HERRINGS, FRESH, BROILED (in the Scotch style)
Scale, gut, cut off the heads, tails, and fins, and wash the herrings, flatten them with great care, remove the backbone, and any little bones that can be taken out with it. Sprinkle the inside of each fish with a little pepper and salt; then place them together in pairs, and press the two inner surfaces as close as possible. Dip them in oatmeal, lay them on the gridiron over a clear fire, and when the undermost fish is broiled, turn them quickly and carefully, without separating them. Serve as hot as possible. A bloater and a fresh herring may be broiled together in this way, but when this is done, the bloater should be well rubbed inside with butter before being laid on the fresh fish, and the oatmeal omitted from it. Time, about fifteen minutes to broil. Sufficient for one person. Probable cost, 1d. or 1 1/2d. each.
A plain, fast fish supper that depends on two things: a properly boned herring and a coating of real oatmeal rather than rolled oats. The pairing trick — two split fish pressed cut side to cut side — keeps the flesh moist and makes the fish easy to turn in one piece.
- The hinge: keep the pair sealedThe two flattened fish act as a single fish, protecting the delicate inner flesh from the direct heat. Turn them with a wide spatula supporting the whole length, or slide them into a hinged fish grill, so they never come apart over the fire.
- Oatmeal, not oatsOatmeal for coating fish is generally medium ground; pinhead is coarser and is best pulsed briefly first. Rolled oats will not adhere and burn in flakes. Press the meal on firmly and shake off the loose surplus.
- "A clear fire" and the gridironThis means coals burnt down past the flame stage — steady radiant heat with no smoke or flare. A grill pan or heavy cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat, lightly oiled, gives the same result indoors; an overhead broiler on its top setting works but browns the oatmeal less evenly.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longFifteen minutes is likely long -- A boned herring is thin, but the two pressed together roughly double that thickness. Over a good hot fire the pair will probably be done before fifteen minutes; check at about four minutes a side and cook until the oatmeal is crisp and the flesh opaque.
- Boning the fishAsk the fishmonger for herring split and boned, or do it yourself: cut down the belly, open the fish flat, and lift the backbone out from the tail end, then run a thumbnail along the flesh to catch the pin bones. Some fine bones will remain.
- BloatersA bloater is a whole herring, ungutted, lightly salted and cold-smoked — still oily and mild rather than dry like a kipper. Kippers are split and more heavily smoked and are not an even swap. Where bloaters are unavailable, use two fresh herrings and add nothing.
- YieldOne pair of fish per person, as the original states. Serve immediately with lemon or a mustard butter, and boiled potatoes or brown bread.
- The costing1d. to 1½d. each is a pre-decimal price from the later nineteenth century, when herring were among the cheapest fish available. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating; treat it as a note on why the dish existed.
Herring were the working food of the whole British and Irish coast, landed in enormous quantities by the Scottish drift-net fleets at Wick, Peterhead and Fraserburgh and either salted for export or eaten fresh within a day of landing. Oatmeal was the natural coating in Scotland for the same reason it appeared in almost everything else there — it was the staple grain, cheaper and more available than wheat flour — and herring rolled in oatmeal and fried or grilled is still the standard Scottish treatment. The bloater in the second half of the entry was a Great Yarmouth speciality, a lightly smoked herring that kept only a few days; pairing it with a fresh fish, as here, is often described as a thrifty cook's device rather than a formal dish.