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Herrings, Red, Savoury Of
Soak the herrings in cold water for four hours, then wipe them, take off the skin, bone them, and pound the flesh in a mortar until smooth, along with a little cayenne, an ounce of butter and a dash of cream. Spread the mixture on sippets of hot toast, and sprinkle a little grated hard-boiled yolk of egg over.
A Victorian savoury: the last course of a formal dinner, meant to be salty, sharp and small. The whole thing hinges on how hard your red herrings are cured, which decides how long they need to soak.
- What a red herring isNot a fresh fish and not a kipper. Red herrings are whole herrings heavily salted and cold-smoked for days or weeks until stiff, dry and mahogany-coloured, keeping without refrigeration. The nearest things still sold are hard-smoked salt herring from Eastern European or Caribbean grocers; Dutch bokking is smoked herring but usually much softer than a true red herring. A modern kipper is far wetter and milder, and needs little or no soaking.
- Judge the soak by the fishFour hours in cold water suits a genuinely hard cure. A soft modern smoked herring will be waterlogged and bland after that; give it thirty minutes to an hour, then taste a shred of the flesh before committing the whole batch. Change the water once either way.
- BoningWork along the backbone with your fingers after skinning; the flesh of a cured herring separates in flakes and the pin bones lift out in rows. Any bone you miss survives the mortar as a splinter, so this is worth doing patiently.
- Mortar or machineA small food processor does in twenty seconds what the mortar does in ten minutes, but pulse rather than run it — over-processed fish turns pasty and greasy. Have the butter at room temperature so the paste emulsifies rather than smearing.
- QuantitiesAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. The recipe never says how many herrings, but that quantity of butter suits roughly a couple of fish; a "dash" of cream is probably a tablespoon or two, enough to make the paste spreadable. Add no salt at all — the fish carries plenty — and taste before deciding on more cayenne.
- SippetsSippets are small neat pieces of toast, usually triangles or fingers cut from a thin slice with the crusts off. Cut them after toasting, and assemble at the last moment: the paste softens the toast quickly.
- The egg yolkPush a cold hard-boiled yolk through a fine sieve rather than grating it, for a finer golden crumb; a garnish of sieved yolk is later often called mimosa. The white is discarded here, or kept for a salad.
- Yield and serviceThe quantities given will make only a small amount of paste, enough for a handful of sippets as a savoury course for a few people. Served hot and immediately; it is not a chilled potted-fish spread, though the paste can be made an hour ahead and kept covered.
The savoury — a hot, salty, deliberately un-sweet mouthful served after the pudding in a Victorian and Edwardian dinner — was largely a British institution, and anchovy, cheese and cured herring did most of the work. Red herrings themselves are far older: the hard-smoked, long-keeping cure was a staple of the North Sea fisheries for centuries, cheap enough to be proverbial food for the poor and durable enough to ship inland without ice. Great Yarmouth built much of its trade on them. The phrase "red herring" for a false trail is generally traced to the fish's powerful smell, said to have been used to train or distract hounds, though that story is traditional rather than well documented. By the time Cassell's was compiled the smoked-herring trade was industrial in scale, and recipes like this one — pounding a coarse preserved fish with butter and cream into something that could appear on good china — show the Victorian kitchen's habit of promoting cheap ingredients into polite company.