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Red Herrings or Bloaters, to Fry
Split open the herrings or bloaters, and cut off their heads. Melt a little butter or dripping in a frying-pan, put in the fish, and shake the pan over a clear fire. Serve on a hot dish with a small piece of butter laid on each. Time to fry, five minutes. Probable cost, 1d. or 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient, one or two for each person. (For other ways of cooking, see HERRINGS, RED.)
Two different fish are being treated as interchangeable here, and the distinction matters more than anything else in the method. A red herring is a hard, heavily salted, long-smoked fish; a bloater is only lightly salted and briefly cold-smoked, and is comparatively mild.
- Soak the red herrings firstOld-style red herrings were cured to keep for months and are aggressively salty straight from the smokehouse. Soak them in cold water or milk for several hours, changing the water, before they go near a pan. Bloaters need no soaking at all.
- What you can actually buyTrue red herrings are now rare outside specialist curers; bloaters survive in a few British smokehouses, chiefly on the east coast. Kippers, which are split before smoking, are the closest thing on most fish counters and behave the same way in the pan.
- Split means butterflyThe fish is opened flat so it lies skin-down in one piece; with bloaters and kippers this is usually done by cutting down the back, though the recipe does not specify. This is not filleting: the backbone stays in and lifts out easily after cooking.
- "A clear fire" is medium-high"A clear fire" -- A clear fire meant a bright, well burnt-through fire without smoke or flare; a medium-high burner in a heavy pan is a reasonable modern equivalent, though the term describes the quality of the heat rather than a set level. Shaking the pan keeps the fish moving rather than turning them repeatedly, which suits skin that tears easily.
- Five minutes is about rightSmoked herring is already salted, dried and cured, though cold smoke does not cook it, so it needs only enough heat to firm the flesh and crisp the skin. Two to three minutes a side is plenty; longer dries it out.
- FatThe recipe offers butter or dripping; dripping was commonly used and browns well, and a neutral oil also works. Butter alone over a hot pan will darken quickly, so add a little oil with it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe allows one or two per person. Brown bread and butter and mustard are usual with cured herring, and a poached egg is sometimes added; the pat of butter melting on the hot fish in the original is the whole sauce.
- The cost noteA penny or three halfpence each made this a very cheap cooked dish.
Red herrings and bloaters were the cured-fish backbone of the nineteenth-century British breakfast and of poor households' dinners alike. Herring landed in vast quantities on the North Sea coast and had to be preserved on the spot: the hardest cure, salted for weeks then smoked until dark and stiff, produced the red herring, a fish that would travel and keep almost indefinitely and was exported across Europe for centuries. The bloater was a later, gentler product, generally associated with Great Yarmouth, salted only briefly and smoked whole and ungutted, which gives it its characteristic slightly gamey flavour; the name is usually traced to the plump, swollen look of the uncleaned fish. Cassell's gives the dish four lines and a price, the cheapness being much of the point: this was food that cost pennies and needed no skill beyond a hot pan. The idiom about a red herring drawing hounds off a scent is often linked to this cure, but the story is traditional rather than documented and the origin of the phrase is disputed.