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HERRINGS, RED, BROILED (another way) (Cut off the heads and tails)
Cut off the heads and tails; open the fish, and pour over them a little hot beer. When it is cold, wipe them dry with a soft cloth, and toast them before the fire until they are hot through. Time, half an hour to soak. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient, one for each person.
A red herring is a whole herring, salted hard and cold-smoked to the colour of mahogany — a keeping fish, not a fresh one. Everything here is about drawing out salt and smoke before heat is applied.
- What a red herring isNot the modern kipper, which is split, lightly brined and only briefly smoked. Red herrings were cured for weeks and are stiff, dark and intensely salty. Hard-salted, hard-smoked herring can still be found in some African and Caribbean groceries; a hard-smoked bloater is the closest common substitute.
- The hinge: the soakThe hot beer is doing the work of desalting and rehydrating. Half an hour suits a genuinely hard cure; a modern kipper or a softer bloater needs far less, or it collapses. Taste a scrap of the flesh before cooking — if it is still fiercely salty, give it longer in fresh hot liquid.
- Beer, and whyAny plain ale or mild bitter. The malt sweetness offsets the salt and the liquid loosens the dried flesh; water alone will do the same job with less flavour. Discard the soaking liquid.
- "Open the fish"Split it down the back and lay it flat, bone in, as you would a kipper. The roe, if present, could be left in and eaten.
- Toasting before the fireAn open fire meant fierce radiant heat on one side. A grill or broiler on high, the fish a few inches from the element, is the nearest equivalent — only a few minutes a side. "Hot through" is the whole aim: the fish is already cured and needs no cooking, only warming.
- ButterThe recipe omits it, but butter on the hot fish as it comes off the heat is a common accompaniment to a dry cure and greatly improves it.
- Cost and serving1½d. each places this among the cheapest possible cooked dishes of the period. One fish per person, with brown bread and butter, boiled potatoes or a poached egg; this is breakfast or supper food rather than a dinner course.
Red herrings kept for months without ice and travelled anywhere, which made them one of the staple cheap proteins of Britain from the medieval period until refrigeration and the milder kipper cure displaced them in the later nineteenth century. Great Yarmouth built its fortune on the trade, and the fish's strong scent is the source of the figurative "red herring" — the phrase is generally traced to the idea of a pungent cured fish drawn across a trail to distract hounds, a story popularised in the early nineteenth century rather than documented much before it. Cassell's gives several methods for the same fish, all of them variations on soaking out the salt before applying heat, which tells you how routine the ingredient was in a household kitchen and how hard the cure could be.