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Herrings, Salted at Home
Procure the herrings as fresh as possible. Scale, gut, and clean, but do not wash them. Leave the roes in the fish. Make a brine strong enough to float an egg. Put the herrings in this, and let them lie fourteen or sixteen hours. Drain them well, and put them into jars, with a thick layer of salt under them, and salt between each row of herrings. Cover tightly, to keep them free from air. When wanted for use, soak the fish in a little milk and boil or broil them in the usual way.
This is a room-temperature salt cure with no weighed salt, no measured brine concentration, no controlled temperature and no defined storage life. Salted herring is still made commercially and at home, but it is done to measured specifications; the instructions below do not meet any of them.
- The float-an-egg brine is not a measurementAn egg begins to float somewhere around a tenth of the water's weight in salt and will keep floating all the way up to a saturated brine, and the exact point shifts with the egg's age and the water temperature, so the test fixes no concentration at all. Curing safety depends on the salt level in the flesh, not in the bucket, and that figure is never established here.
- Fourteen hours will not cure the interiorFourteen hours may not cure the interior -- Salt penetration depends on the strength of the brine, which is never fixed, and the roe left inside the body cavity is the slowest part to take salt. The dry salt packing that follows is left to do the rest of the work with no stated quantity and no stated time, so nothing in the method establishes that the flesh reaches a preserving salt level.
- Clostridium botulinum type EThis is the specific hazard of salted and lightly preserved fish. It is common in the gut and on the skin of marine fish, tolerates cold, and grows without air. The recipe deliberately seals the jars airtight, which is exactly the condition it favours, at a salt level that is not documented to inhibit it.
- The fish are never washed and the guts are handled looselyThe fish are never washed -- "Scale, gut, and clean, but do not wash" leaves gut residue, bacteria and enzymes on the flesh, and the roes are left in on purpose. Controlled salt-fish production works to a known salt level and temperature rather than leaving the ripening to chance.
- ParasitesHerring commonly carry Anisakis larvae, and light salting does not reliably kill them; the modern control is a specified deep-freezing step, which no nineteenth-century recipe contains. This recipe does at least end by directing that the fish be boiled or broiled, which would deal with them, so the risk arises only if the cured fish are eaten uncooked.
- No storage conditions givenThere is no cellar temperature, no maximum keeping time, and no instruction to check the brine or the salt for spoilage. "Cover tightly, to keep them free from air" is the only preservation control offered.
- If you want salt herringBuy it from a producer working to a food-safety standard, or follow a current published curing recipe that specifies salt by weight as a percentage of fish weight, a curing temperature, and a freezing step.
Salted herring underpinned the diet and the economy of northern Europe for centuries: the great herring fisheries of the North Sea and the Baltic supplied a cheap, portable protein that kept through winter and through Lent, and the gutting-and-barrelling method associated with the Dutch fleet is generally traced to the late medieval period. By the time Cassell's was compiled, industrially cured herring, whether salted, pickled as rollmops or smoked into kippers and bloaters, was one of the cheapest foods in Britain, and a household recipe like this one existed because fresh herring arrived in gluts at a price that made preserving a whole basketful worthwhile. The final direction, to soak the fish in milk before cooking, is the standard old trick for drawing out salt while softening the flesh, and it survives in modern salt-cod and salt-herring cookery.