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HERRINGS, PICKLED (in the French style)
Scale and clean a dozen perfectly fresh herrings, without washing them. Cut off their heads, and remove the entrails, leaving the milts and roes in their place. Put the fish into an earthen jar, strew salt over them, and let them lie for twenty-four hours, turning them over at the end of twelve hours. Drain them, and place them in an enamelled saucepan, with a dozen peppercorns, a bay-leaf, six cloves, and a large onion sliced. Pour over them as much cold vinegar and water as will cover them. Place them on a brisk fire, bring them quickly to a boil, and let them boil just two minutes. Take them from the fire, and let them get nearly cold in the saucepan before removing them to the jar in which they are to be kept. Lift them out carefully, pour the liquid over them, and keep in a cool place. They will remain good for some time. Probable cost, 1s. per dozen.
This is a soused or pickled herring intended to keep for weeks in a cold larder, and that is precisely where it fails: the acid, the salt and the storage temperature are all left to the cook's judgement. The points below explain why the method cannot be relied on today rather than how to adjust it.
- The acid is unmeasured"As much cold vinegar and water as will cover them" gives no ratio, and the vinegar of the 1870s varied widely in strength. Preservation of fish by pickling depends on driving the finished liquid below about pH 4.5 and holding it there; a recipe that does not specify the dilution cannot guarantee that, so the jar may sit for weeks at a pH that permits bacterial growth.
- Two minutes at a boil is not a preserving stepThe brief boil sets the flesh and flavours the liquor. It does not sterilise the fish, the jar or the liquid, and the centre of a whole herring with roe intact will not have been held at any temperature long enough to matter. Nothing in the method is a pasteurisation.
- Botulism risk in the sealed jarFish held under liquid in a covered jar is an anaerobic environment. Clostridium botulinum type E is associated with marine fish and northern waters and grows at refrigerator temperatures, which is exactly the combination this recipe creates once the acid level is uncertain.
- "A cool place" is not a temperatureThe instruction assumes a stone larder or cellar, cold in winter and considerably warmer in summer, but no temperature is stated. Modern preserved-fish practice specifies a measured brine, a measured acid and a stated holding temperature; none of the three is present here.
- The salt cure is by eye"Strew salt over them" for twenty-four hours may draw a good deal of water out of the fish or very little, depending on how heavy a hand is used. Salt concentration is one of the two barriers that makes pickled herring safe, and it is not quantified.
- ParasitesHerring commonly carry Anisakis larvae. Commercially marinated herring today is made from fish that has been frozen to a specified time and temperature first, a control the nineteenth-century kitchen had no means of applying; the two-minute boil here cannot be relied on to heat a whole fish through.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for rollmops or soused herring with stated vinegar strength, salt weight, refrigeration temperature and a short stated keeping time.
- Reading the rest of the recipeThe enamelled saucepan keeps vinegar off bare iron or copper, the usual reason such pans were called for, and that is still sound practice. Milts are soft roe; the cost note, 1s. per dozen, presumably refers to the price of a dozen whole fish.
In Cassell's, the "French style" appears to stand apart from the heavily salted, smoked and barrelled herring of the British trade: here the fish are only briefly salted and then cooked in a spiced vinegar. Herring were among the cheapest sea fish in Victorian Britain, landed in enormous quantities on the east coast and hawked inland by rail, and a shilling a dozen puts them at the bottom of any fishmonger's slate. Pickling in vinegar with peppercorns, cloves, bay and onion was a domestic answer to a glut that arrived faster than a household could eat it, and versions of the same treatment appear across English cookery books under the name soused herring. The recipe's confidence that they "will remain good for some time" reflects a kitchen that judged spoilage by smell and taste alone, before pH meters, refrigeration or any understanding of what grows in an airless jar of under-acidified fish.