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HERRINGS, RED, BROILED (another way) (Take off the heads and tails)
Take off the heads and tails, split the herrings open, and take out the backbones. Beat an egg, stir into it a tea-spoonful of clarified butter. Dip the fish into this, and sprinkle over them, rather thickly, finely-grated bread-crumbs, seasoned with a little pepper and powdered herbs. Broil them on a gridiron about six inches above a clear fire, and serve them on hot toast. Time, five minutes to broil. Probable cost, 1d. each. Sufficient, one for each person.
A red herring is not a fresh fish: it is herring cured hard in salt and heavily cold-smoked until stiff and mahogany-coloured. Everything else about this recipe depends on dealing with that salt first.
- Soak before you do anything elseTraditional red herrings were cured to be shelf-stable and are aggressively salty, in a way modern kippers and bloaters are not. They were normally steeped in warm water or milk for an hour or more, and sometimes overnight, before cooking; the recipe assumes you know this. Skip it and the fish is close to inedible.
- What to buy nowTrue hard-cured red herring is scarce outside specialist smokehouses and Middle Eastern or Caribbean shops. A kipper is the nearest common substitute, already split and much less salty, so it needs little or no soaking.
- Clarified butterA teaspoon of clarified butter, warm but not hot, stirred into a beaten egg. Melted butter with the milk solids poured off, or ghee, does the same job. Add it off the heat or it will begin to set the egg.
- Powdered herbsPeriod cookery books describe dried herbs ground to a powder for seasoning, commonly thyme, marjoram or parsley, sometimes savory. Use about half a teaspoon of a dried mixed-herb blend per fish, and no salt at all in the crumb -- the recipe calls only for pepper and herbs.
- The gridiron, translatedSix inches above a clear fire is a moderately hot grill, not a searing one. Under a domestic broiler set the rack in the middle, not the top slot, and grease the bars or the crumb coating will tear away. A ridged cast-iron pan over medium heat works as well.
- Five minutes is rightThe fish is cured and cold-smoked rather than cooked, but it is edible as it stands, so broiling is mainly about heating it through and setting the crumbs. Two to three minutes a side, turned once, matches the recipe's five minutes; longer dries the flesh to straw.
- Yield and servingOne fish per person, on hot toast as the recipe directs, as a breakfast or supper dish. A lemon wedge suits it.
Red herrings were an ordinary preserved fish of the British poor for centuries, cured at the great East Anglian curing towns \ Yarmouth above all, whose trade in them ran from the medieval period into the twentieth century. The name comes simply from the colour the long smoking gives the skin; the figurative sense of a false trail, from the notion of drawing a strong-smelling fish across a scent, is a later and much-repeated derivation rather than a documented one. The price of a penny each places the dish firmly among the cheap breakfast foods of the late Victorian household, alongside bloaters and kippers, and egg-and-crumb coating was one common way of dressing up a coarse salt fish.