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Herrings, Salted, with Potatoes
Take two or three salted herrings, which have been washed and dried, and put them into a quart stone jar, nearly filled with sliced raw potatoes. Pour a little water over, and bake in a moderate oven until the potatoes are done. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A frugal one-pot bake that depends almost entirely on how much salt you pull out of the fish beforehand. The recipe assumes you know that step; it is worth spelling out.
- Soak the herrings first"Washed and dried" understates it. Hard-salted herrings need 8-12 hours in cold water, changed two or three times, before they are edible; taste a corner of the flesh before you commit. Modern salt herring sold in brine tubs is milder and may need only two or three hours. Skip this and the whole dish is inedible.
- Moderate oven350F/180C. Cover the dish so the potatoes steam rather than dry out; the small amount of water is the only moisture in the pot.
- The stone jarA quart-sized deep earthenware or stoneware pot. The recipe does not say whether it was covered, though a cover would keep the potatoes from drying out; a small casserole or lidded Dutch oven will stand in.
- TimingHalf an hour looks optimistic for raw potatoes packed into a deep jar, and it may take considerably longer; test with a knife point rather than trusting the clock. Slicing the potatoes thin, no more than 1/8 inch, brings it closer to the stated time.
- Don't salt itNo seasoning is listed because the fish supplies all of it. Add pepper if you like, and a bay leaf or a sliced onion between the potato layers, but leave the salt cellar alone until the dish is on the table.
- YieldA quart jar of potatoes and two or three herrings will serve two or three people generously by current appetites, not the four or five claimed. Scale up in a larger covered pot if you are feeding a table.
- CostSixpence in the later nineteenth century was a working supper for a family. The figure is a measure of how cheap cured herring was, not a guide to anything you will pay now.
Salted herring was the great protein of the North Atlantic and Baltic, cured by the barrel from the medieval Hanseatic trade onward and still, in the late nineteenth century, one of the cheapest ways for a British household to put fish on the table. Cassell's places this among its plainest entries: two ingredients, one pot, one oven, and a costing in pence. The pairing of salt fish with potatoes is near-universal wherever both were cheap, from Scandinavian layered bakes to the Irish and Scottish habit of eating a herring with potatoes as a whole meal, the potato absorbing the salt and the fish oil serving as the sauce.