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Herrings, Pickled, to Cook
Cut the heads and tails from a couple of pickled herrings. Soak them in lukewarm water for three or four hours, then dry, and broil them over a clear fire. Brush a little salad-oil over them just before sending to table, and serve with sliced onion or chopped parsley and capers. Time, five minutes to broil. Cost, 1 1/2d. each.
A two-minute preparation with a long wait attached: the whole point is drawing salt out of a cured fish before it meets the fire. Everything else is garnish.
- What "pickled" means hereIn a Victorian British kitchen this is a salt-cured herring — dry-salted or brined in a barrel — not the sweet-sour vinegar herring of a Scandinavian jar. Look for salt herring, schmaltz herring or the Dutch/Baltic salted fillets sold in tubs; a vinegar-pickled herring will not behave the same way and needs no soaking.
- The soak is the hingeThree or four hours in lukewarm water is a starting point, not a rule, because the salt load varies enormously between cures. Change the water two or three times and taste a corner of the flesh before broiling; a heavily cured fish may want overnight in the refrigerator, and lukewarm water left standing all afternoon in a warm room is best avoided.
- Broil means grillRead this as an overhead grill or broiler at high heat, the rack about four inches from the element, or a ridged pan over a strong flame. "A clear fire" meant coals burnt down past smoking, so the fish took heat rather than soot.
- Five minutes, turned onceFive minutes is the recipe's own total — roughly two to three minutes a side. The flesh is already firmed by curing, so it needs colour and heat rather than long cooking; pushed further it dries and the skin turns to paper.
- Salad-oilNineteenth-century salad-oil was usually olive oil, sometimes a refined seed oil. Any mild olive oil brushed on after grilling does the job — it is a dressing, not a cooking fat.
- Preparing the fishHeads and tails off, as instructed, but also scrape the scales and open the fish out flat along the belly; a split herring grills far more evenly than a round one. Bones can be left in and lifted out at the table after cooking.
- Yield and servingTwo herrings serve two as a breakfast or supper dish, one as a substantial plate. The sliced onion, parsley and capers are not decoration — the sharpness cuts the oily, salty flesh, and a squeeze of lemon belongs there too.
- The priceThree-halfpence each, as the recipe states: this is a cheap dish by any measure of the period.
Salt herring was the cheap protein of the British and northern European table for centuries: barrelled at the ports — Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Wick and the Scottish east coast among them — and carried inland to households with no ice and no fishmonger. The cure was heavy because it had to be, which is why every recipe of this kind begins with a soak rather than a knife. Cassell's gives it as a plain dish with its costs noted, and the treatment here is essentially unchanged from far older practice: freshen, grill, and cut the salt with onion, capers and something green. Herring is often said to have become scarcer in home waters after the industrial fishery of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which may be one reason a dish once assumed to be the cheapest thing on the page now takes some hunting to reproduce.