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Herrings, Pickled
Take half a pound of salt, half a pound of bay-salt, an ounce of sugar, and an ounce of saltpetre. Pound all well together until reduced to a fine powder. Procure the herrings as fresh as possible, cut off the heads and tails, open the fish, and lay them for one hour in brine strong enough to float an egg. Drain, dry them with a soft cloth, and put them in layers into a deep jar, with a little of the powder between each layer, and a little both at the top and bottom of the jar. When the jar is full, press it down and cover it closely. The fish will be ready in three months. Probable cost, 1s. per dozen. The above quantity of salt is enough for two dozen herrings.
This is a dry nitrate cure for oily fish held three months at unstated temperature, and the numbers in it fall well outside anything now considered acceptable. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a working method.
- The saltpetre dose is the main problemAn ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) shared among two dozen herrings amounts to several thousand parts per million of nitrate if the flesh takes up all of it — well above modern limits for cured fish, which are set in the low hundreds of ppm. Nitrate at this level is a health concern in its own right and cannot be corrected by guesswork.
- No temperature is given for three monthsThe recipe assumes an unheated larder or cellar at perhaps 45-50F. A cured, sealed, low-oxygen jar of oily fish held at modern room temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum type E, which is associated with fish and tolerates cold better than most strains. Without a measured storage temperature the whole procedure is unverifiable.
- Nothing is ever cookedThe fish are salted and packed raw; the recipe contains no cooking step at any point. Every safety margin rests on the salt and nitrate concentration in the flesh, and the recipe gives no way to measure either — no weight of fish, no target brine strength in the finished product, no water-phase salt figure.
- "Bay-salt" is not a defined ingredientBay salt was coarse sea salt made by solar evaporation in salt pans, sold unrefined and of variable purity and grain. Substituting a modern salt changes both the rate of penetration and the effective salt load, so the original proportions cannot be reproduced even in principle.
- "Strong enough to float an egg"The old test for a strong brine. How strong is uncertain: an egg's buoyancy depends on its own freshness, and the test is generally reckoned to indicate something nearer 10 per cent salt by weight than saturation. It applies only to the one-hour soak here, not to the dry cure that follows, and it tells you nothing about the salt content of the fish after three months.
- If you want salt herringUse a current recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern curing text, which will specify fish weight, salt percentage, cure composition and refrigeration temperature. Commercially cured herring is also widely sold.
- The costing"1s. per dozen" is a shilling for twelve herrings, a reminder of how cheap and abundant the fish was in late-Victorian Britain. It has no bearing on anything you would buy today.
Salt herring was one of the great staples of northern Europe for centuries before it became a recipe in a domestic cookery book: the North Sea and Baltic fisheries salted, smoked and barrelled the summer catch on a scale that shaped ports from Yarmouth to Bergen, and cured herring was cheap protein for households and ships alike. This is a preserving procedure, the domestic small-scale cousin of the barrel-curing trade, and its ingredients name that lineage — bay salt from the solar salt pans, saltpetre for the colour and the keeping quality that nitrate gives cured flesh. The three-month wait and the unheated cellar it assumes belong to a period before household refrigeration, when a jar in a cold larder was the only storage a cook had and heavy salting was the only reliable defence.