Home › The Principles of Cookery › Herrings, Smoked, to Prepare
Herrings, Smoked, to Prepare
Cut off the head and tail from a smoked herring, and remove the bones. Cut the fish into slices about half an inch in thickness, and let them soak in salad-oil for five or six hours. Drain them, put them into a dish, pour fresh oil over them, and serve. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient, one or two for each person.
A cold assembly rather than a cooked dish: the oil does all the work, softening a hard-cured fish until it is edible without heat. Everything depends on which herring you start with.
- Which smoked herringCassell's most likely means the hard-cured, heavily salted, fully smoked "red herring" of the period, dry and stiff as a board and keepable for months, though "smoked herring" could also cover softer bloaters. A modern kipper or a soft cold-smoked fillet is a much wetter, far less salty product and will not stand up to six hours in oil in the same way. Whole hard-smoked herring can sometimes be found at Caribbean, West African or Eastern European grocers if you want the original texture.
- Salad-oilNineteenth-century salad-oil usually means olive oil, though other bland oils were sold under the name. Use something neutral enough not to fight the smoke; you will need roughly a cup to cover the slices of one fish.
- Soak out the salt firstThe recipe assumes the cook already knows this, but a true red herring is close to inedible straight from the packet. Steep the whole fish in cold water or milk for several hours, changing it once or twice, and taste a shred before going on to the oil.
- BoningHead and tail off, then split the fish along the backbone and lift the spine out in one piece. Half-inch slices means cutting the boned sides crosswise.
- The soak, refrigeratedA heavily salt-cured fish would have taken five or six hours in oil in a cool Victorian larder without trouble; with a modern lightly cured herring, keep it covered in the refrigerator throughout and eat it the same day. Bring it back to room temperature before serving or the oil will be cloudy and stiff.
- Drain and re-oilThe fresh oil poured over at the end is presumably largely a matter of appearance: the first oil comes out cloudy with salt and fish solids. Discard it rather than reusing it.
- Cost and yieldA penny-halfpenny each was cheap even in the 1870s. As the original states, one or two herrings per person makes a substantial cold supper.
- ServingIt reads as a savoury or breakfast relish rather than a main course. It wants coarse brown bread and butter, thin raw onion, boiled potatoes or a squeeze of lemon to cut the oil.
The red herring — heavily brined and then smoked hard over a long period until it kept without refrigeration — was one of the great cheap proteins of the English coast, associated above all with Great Yarmouth, whose autumn herring fishery supplied both the domestic market and a large export trade to the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. Because it needed no cooking and no ice, it fed sailors, labourers and Lenten households alike, and it is the fish of the old phrase "neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring". Soaking cured slices in olive oil to soften them is often described as a southern-European way with salt fish, though the route by which it reached a British household dictionary of the 1870s is not documented.