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Salad of Herrings
Soak a couple of pickled herrings in milk for an hour to take out the salt. Bone them, and tear the flesh into flakes. Mix with them half a dozen cold boiled potatoes cut into slices as for potato salad, and add a salt-spoonful of finely-minced onion. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, and work lightly into them a simple salad dressing of oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. This salad should be a little moist, therefore add a spoonful or two of milk to the dressing if it is too dry. If liked, cold meat finely minced, sour apples, and boiled beetroot may be put into it. The dressing should be added just before the salad is about to be served. Probable cost of herrings, 1d. to 2d. each. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A cold-larder dish that depends almost entirely on the herring you start with, and on dressing it at the last moment so the potatoes do not go pasty.
- "Pickled herring" here means salt herring"Pickled herring" here almost certainly means salt herring -- the instruction to soak out the salt points to hard-cured barrel fish rather than the vinegar-soused kind. Modern jarred herring in vinegar or cream sauce is already mild and sweetened; soaking it in milk will only wash out the flavour. If you buy schmaltz or salt herring fillets from a Northern European or Jewish deli, soak as directed and taste before dressing.
- Why milk and not waterMilk draws salt while leaving the flesh less waterlogged than a plain soak, and it softens the sharp cured edge. Drain and pat dry before flaking, or the dressing will slide off.
- A salt-spoonfulThe salt spoon of a Victorian cruet set holds roughly a quarter teaspoon. That is a restrained amount of raw onion for six servings; a shallot, minced fine, is closer to modern taste if you want it forward.
- Potato choiceSix cold boiled potatoes is roughly 1½ lb peeled if they are medium-sized; the recipe does not specify a variety, but waxy potatoes hold their slices, while floury varieties collapse into the dressing and give you a paste rather than a salad.
- The dressing"A simple salad dressing" here is just oil, vinegar, salt and pepper; three parts oil to one of vinegar is a safe starting proportion, though period dressings varied. Go easy on the salt until the herring is in, since even soaked fish carries plenty.
- Dress at the last momentThis is the instruction that matters. Cold potato absorbs dressing steadily and turns heavy and dull; mix everything else ahead, chill, and add the oil and vinegar as it goes to the table.
- The optional additionsMinced cold meat, sour apple and boiled beetroot turn this into the Scandinavian-style herring salad. Add the beetroot last and fold gently unless you want the whole bowl pink.
- Yield and costFive or six as a first course or supper dish, as stated. The "1d. to 2d. each" is a late-nineteenth-century price and tells you herring was among the cheapest protein on the market.
Salt herring was the workhorse preserved fish of northern Europe for centuries, packed in barrels and shipped inland where fresh sea fish never reached; British cookery books of the 1800s treat it as a pantry staple rather than a delicacy. This particular combination — flaked cured herring, cold potato, onion, and often beetroot and apple — belongs to a family of dishes found across the Baltic and North Sea coasts, from Swedish sillsallad to the German and Dutch herring salads. It is, in the end, exactly what it appears to be: an assembly of things already cooked or already cured, requiring no fire. The note on price is characteristic of the book, which was written for households counting pennies, and it makes the point that this was a filling dish for very little money.