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HERRINGS, RED, BUFFED (a Scotch dish)
Soak pickled herrings in water until the salt is almost extracted. Push a stick through the eyes, and hang the fish in the sun or wind to dry. When wanted for use, broil or boil them like fresh herrings. Time, two days to soak. Probable cost, 1d. or 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient, half a dozen for two or three persons.
This is a curing instruction rather than a cooking one, and it is the curing step that fails modern standards. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then the specific problem.
- Why this cannot be made as writtenThe method deliberately removes the salt that was preserving the fish, then leaves the desalted fish hanging at ambient temperature for an unspecified period. Salt content, air temperature, humidity and drying time are all unmeasured, and those are precisely the variables that decide whether a fish dries or rots.
- The specific pathogenHerring and other marine fish are a known vehicle for Clostridium botulinum type E, which grows at refrigerator temperatures and in the low-oxygen interior of a whole fish. Traditional salt-and-smoke cures suppress it by keeping water activity low; soaking "until the salt is almost extracted" undoes that protection before the drying begins. Commercial dried and salted fish today is made to measured brine strengths and controlled drying conditions for this reason.
- Cooking does not fix itBroiling or boiling will kill vegetative bacteria, and botulinum toxin is itself broken down by thorough boiling, but broiling gives no such assurance and the products of general spoilage are not dealt with by heat at all. If you want dried or salt herring, buy it cured commercially or follow a current, measured recipe.
- "Pickled" here means saltedIn this book a pickled herring is one packed down in dry salt or strong brine in a barrel, not something steeped in vinegar. That is why two days of soaking is needed to draw the salt out.
- "Red" and "buffed"A red herring is one heavily salted and cold-smoked until the flesh is dark and hard. "Buffed" is harder to pin down: the term is rare, and what it means here can really only be read off this method, which soaks a hard-cured fish and then re-dries it in sun or wind.
- Cost and yield1d. to 1½d. each is Victorian retail pricing, an indication that these were among the cheapest fish available. The stated yield, six fish for two or three people, is what the recipe itself gives.
Herring was the great cheap fish of the British and Irish coasts, and the Scottish east-coast fishery at Wick, Fraserburgh and Peterhead cured and barrelled it in vast quantities for domestic and Baltic markets through the nineteenth century. Cured herring came in a whole vocabulary of grades: bloaters lightly salted and briefly smoked, kippers split and cold-smoked, red herrings salted hard and smoked at length until they would keep for a long time. Whatever "buffing" was, this version of it reads as a household operation rather than a commercial one, a way of turning a fiercely salt barrel fish back into something closer to fresh eating by soaking out the salt and then firming it up again in the wind. Its appearance among Scotch dishes in a general dictionary of cookery is a reminder that a great deal of Victorian preserving was still done at home, by eye and by weather, with no thermometer anywhere in sight.