Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sprats, Baked
Sprats, Baked
Clean the sprats, cut off the heads, draw them at the gills, and dry them with a soft cloth. Put them into a dish, and cover with equal quantities of vinegar and water. Add a little seasoning in the proportion of a bay-leaf, a small onion, two or three allspice, a little salt, and a quarter of an ounce of whole pepper to each pint of the liquor. Cover the dish closely, and bake the sprats till done enough in a gentle oven. When they are cold, take off the cover, pour cold vinegar over them, and tie them up. They will keep for a week or two. Time to bake, half to three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1d. per pound.
This is a soused fish — sprats baked slowly in diluted vinegar, then kept under fresh vinegar and eaten cold. Nearly everything hinges on the gentle heat and the acid, so a few notes cover it.
- Gentle ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a low oven, somewhere around 300-325F, is a reasonable modern reading. The point is not to brown the fish but to hold it at a bare simmer in the liquor; anything hotter breaks the sprats apart.
- Use a non-reactive dishVinegar and water for three-quarters of an hour will pit aluminium and strip a cast-iron pan. Glass, glazed earthenware or enamelled cast iron, with a lid or a tight foil cover.
- Draw them at the gillsSprats are too small to gut through a belly slit. With the head cut off, hook a finger or the point of a knife into the gill opening and pull the viscera out in one piece — the body stays whole, which matters because it has to hold together in the vinegar.
- The liquor measurementsA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz or about 2.5 cups. A quarter of an ounce of whole pepper is roughly a tablespoon of peppercorns, which is assertive but correct for a souse.
- What a sprat isA small member of the herring family, 3-5 inches, sold whole and usually frozen outside the winter season. Fresh sardines or very small herring behave the same way in this treatment; the timing holds if the fish are of similar size.
- Storage"They will keep for a week or two" assumes a cold stone larder and a covering of vinegar deep enough to exclude air. Keep them refrigerated, fully submerged, and treat three or four days as the sensible limit — the acid slows spoilage but this is not a sterilised pack.
- Yield and servingRoughly a pound and a half of sprats will fill one baking dish and would serve about four as a first course. Serve them cold from the liquor with buttered brown bread, as with any soused herring.
Sprats were the cheapest fish in Victorian Britain, and they came ashore in vast winter shoals from the North Sea and the Thames estuary, hawked in the streets from November to February. Souse, meaning to steep in vinegar and spice, is the standard English preservation for oily fish of this kind, and the same method appears across the period under the names soused herring and pickled mackerel; the vinegar both keeps the fish and cuts the richness. That the recipe sits in a general cookery dictionary rather than a book of luxuries is the point: it is a way of turning a glut of a very perishable, very cheap fish into something that would last through the week in a cold larder.