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Herrings, Red, Mock Anchovy Toast Of
Cut the head and tail from a red herring, and let it soak in boiling water for five or ten minutes. Drain it, peel off the skin, open it, and take out as many of the bones as possible. Cut one half of the fish into slices about a quarter of an inch in thickness, and the other half into small squares. Divide a round of hot buttered toast into quarters, and place a square of herring-flesh on each quarter, and round it one of the narrow slices. This will give mock anchovy toast. Place the pieces of herring between bread and butter, instead of upon toast, and you will have mock anchovy sandwiches. It will take about ten minutes to soak the herring. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient for one person.
A savoury from the era when a hard-cured red herring hung in every larder. The whole thing hinges on getting the salt down to a level a person can eat.
- What a red herring isNot a kipper. A red herring is a whole herring, usually ungutted, heavily salted and then smoked over a long period until it is stiff, dark and intensely salty. The nearest things now sold are Greek renga or the salt-cured herring found in Caribbean and Middle Eastern shops; Dutch bokking is usually a milder hot-smoked fish, and a hot-smoked kipper fillet is milder still and needs little or no soaking.
- Soaking is the whole recipeTen minutes in boiling water is calibrated to a nineteenth-century cure, and modern products vary enormously. Soak, then taste a sliver before you commit: if it still stings with salt, change the water and repeat. Over-soaking costs you flavour, under-soaking makes the toast inedible.
- BoningAfter soaking, the fish opens along the backbone and much of the frame can be lifted away, though the recipe's own "as many of the bones as possible" admits that some will stay behind. Pin bones come away more easily with the tip of a knife than with fingers; work while the flesh is still warm.
- Why "mock anchovy"Salt-cured anchovy was the expensive standard for a savoury toast. The dark, salty, faintly bitter cure of a red herring stands in for it, which is the whole point of the dish and of its price note.
- The toastButter it hot and generously; the butter is doing the same job as the oil in an anchovy paste, cutting the salt. A round of bread cut into quarters gives four small pieces, so the yield is one substantial savoury or four canapes.
- Cost and portion"Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each" is Cassell's usual costing note, and "sufficient for one person" reflects a Victorian savoury course served after the sweet. A single herring stretched across four canapes will serve two to four at modern portions.
- SeasoningAdd no salt anywhere. A grind of pepper, a squeeze of lemon, or a little cayenne on the butter is in keeping with period savouries and will lift the smoke.
Red herrings were among the oldest preserved fish of northern Europe: split-free, gutted or not, salted in barrels and smoked in tall wooden houses at Yarmouth and along the Dutch coast until they turned deep russet, keeping for months without ice and travelling anywhere. That cheapness and durability made them a byword for poor men's food, and the English idiom of the red herring is often said to come from one dragged across a trail to throw hounds off the scent — a traditional derivation rather than a documented one. By the time Cassell's was compiled, the Victorian dinner ended with a small hot savoury, and anchovy toast was the standard of the genre; recipes of this kind, built around the words "mock" and "probable cost", belong to a strand of household cookery aimed squarely at the clerk's household that wanted the shape of a fashionable table without the grocer's bill. The same book's confidence that a reader knows what to do with a whole hard-cured herring is itself a fair measure of how much larders have changed.