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Herrings, Pie Of
Choose some herrings with soft roes; scale and clean them well, cut off their heads, fins, and tails, split them open, take out the bones, and season the inner surface of the fish with a little salt and pepper. Line the edge of a buttered pie-dish with a good crust. Spread over the bottom of the dish a layer half an inch thick of equal parts of apples and onions, finely minced. Place the herrings on this, and cover them with another layer. Sprinkle the surface with grated nutmeg and finely-shredded lemon-rind. Place two or three small pieces of butter here and there on the top, pour a little water in, cover the pie with a crust, and bake in a good oven.
A plain Victorian fish pie that depends on two things the original assumes you know: what a soft-roed herring is, and how hot a "good oven" runs. Quantities are left entirely to the cook.
- Soft roes"Soft roe" is the milt of the male fish, not eggs; it was prized for its richness. The recipe specifies soft-roed herrings but says nothing about what to do with the roe once the fish is cleaned and split, so it is presumably meant to stay in. Fishmongers rarely sort by roe now, so ask, or accept whatever comes and treat the roes as a bonus rather than a requirement.
- A good ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "a good oven" simply means a well-heated one, and any modern figure is an approximation. Somewhere around 400F (200C) is a reasonable reading. Give the pie about 35 to 45 minutes, until the crust is set and coloured and the filling bubbles at the edge.
- Scale of the dishNo amounts are given. Four to six boned herrings fill a standard 1.5-quart pie dish, with about 1 lb of apples and onions between them for the two half-inch layers. That serves four.
- Which applesUse a tart cooking apple that collapses — Bramley, or a firm Granny Smith. A sweet dessert apple turns the filling cloying against the oily fish.
- Lining the edgeThe instruction to "line the edge" means pressing a strip of pastry around the rim of the dish so the lid has something to seal to. Damp it before laying the top crust on, then knock up and crimp; a plain shortcrust or rough puff both suit.
- The water"A little" means two or three tablespoons at most. Herrings release a great deal of oil and the apples and onions their own juice; more liquid than that and the bottom of the filling turns to soup.
- BoningSplit from the belly, lay the fish flat, and lift the backbone out with the ribs attached — herring bones come away cleanly. Some of the fine pin bones along the flank may soften in baking, but not dependably; expect to find them.
- Nutmeg and lemonBoth are seasonings, not flavours to lead with: a few gratings of nutmeg and the pared rind of half a lemon, shredded fine, is enough for a dish this size. Nutmeg and lemon-rind are common with oily fish in cookery of this period, presumably to offset the richness.
- ServingServe hot, straight from the dish, with boiled potatoes. It is also good cold the next day, when the set juices behave like a jelly.
Herring pie belongs to the long English tradition of baking cheap, oily sea fish under a crust with fruit — apple, and sometimes gooseberry or rhubarb — to balance the richness, a pairing still visible in the classic gooseberry sauce for mackerel. Herring was among the cheapest protein in Britain through the nineteenth century, landed in enormous quantities on the East Anglian and Scottish coasts and cured or eaten fresh according to how far it had to travel, and pies of this kind appear in Cornish and West Country cookery as well as in the general household manuals. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for middle-class kitchens with a servant or two, includes it alphabetically under the entry heading "Herrings, Pie Of", where the point is economy rather than display; the more famous Cornish relative, stargazy pie, is traditionally made with pilchards and leaves the heads on, poking them through the crust, a detail generally explained as a way of letting the oils drain back into the filling.