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Herrings, Smoked
Clean and open the herrings, and lay them in salt and saltpetre for twenty-four hours. Drain and wipe them dry, and hang them in a row by means of a stick pushed through their eyes. Fill an old cask, open at both ends, with sawdust, put a red-hot iron in the middle of it, and place the herrings over the cask, which must be covered to keep in the smoke. Keep the heat as equal as possible. In about twenty-four hours the herrings will be ready. Probable cost of herrings, 1s. per dozen.
This is a nineteenth-century cold-smoking method for preserving fish at home, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen or garden. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it; use a current, tested recipe from a food-safety authority if you want to smoke fish.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured"Salt and saltpetre" gives no ratio, no weight of fish and no cure strength. Potassium nitrate is effective in curing but toxic in excess, and modern practice fixes nitrate and nitrite in parts per million against a weighed batch. A guess is not a cure.
- Nothing here reaches a safe temperatureA red-hot iron buried in sawdust produces smoke, not cooking heat, and the fish hang above the cask in the drift. The herrings never approach the 145F internal temperature at which fish is safe, and the finished article is a raw cured product depending entirely on the salt for safety.
- Botulism is the specific riskClostridium botulinum type E is associated with fish from cold northern waters and grows without oxygen at refrigeration temperatures. Lightly salted, unrefrigerated smoked fish is the classic vehicle; the salt level in this recipe is unknown and therefore cannot be relied on to inhibit it.
- Parasites are not addressedHerring commonly carries Anisakis larvae. Modern regulation deals with this by a specified commercial freezing step before any product is eaten raw or cold-smoked. Cold smoke does nothing to them.
- The smoke temperature is uncontrolled"Keep the heat as equal as possible" over twenty-four hours describes an open cask with a cooling iron in it. Much of that period will sit in the 40-140F range in which bacteria multiply fastest, with no thermometer anywhere in the process.
- The apparatus itself is a hazardA wooden cask packed with sawdust and a piece of red-hot iron is a smouldering fire in a fuel container, tended for a day and covered to trap the smoke. Beyond the fire risk, an enclosed smouldering fire produces carbon monoxide.
- What the price tells youA shilling a dozen, a penny a fish, puts herring among the cheapest fish on the Victorian market. The recipe records a time when the fish was cheap enough to be worth preserving at home; that cheapness is no argument for the method.
Herring was the great cheap protein of the British and North Sea coasts, and almost all of it was salted or smoked because fresh fish could not travel far before the railways. The trade produced a whole vocabulary of grades: the hard, heavily salted and long-smoked "red herring" of Yarmouth, which kept for months and is traditionally said to have given English the phrase for a false trail; the lightly smoked whole bloater; and the split kipper, whose invention is traditionally credited to the Northumberland curer John Woodger in the 1840s, though split-and-smoked fish long predate any single claim. Smoking was still understood as a household skill in the 1870s and 1880s, something a cook in a coastal town might do with a broken cask when herring came in at a shilling a dozen. By the end of the century commercial smokehouses, ice and rail transport had taken the work out of domestic hands, and pages like this one survive as a record of the last generation that expected to cure its own fish.