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Sprats, Dried
Dried sprats are sometimes eaten plain, but they are very dry and salt. If liked, they may be slightly broiled, but perhaps the best way of serving them is to put them in a basin, pour boiling water upon them, then in a few minutes skin them, and serve them very hot.
Barely a recipe — three sentences on making a hard, salty cured fish palatable. The instruction that matters is the boiling-water soak, which both softens the flesh and pulls out enough salt to make the fish edible.
- What a sprat isSprattus sprattus, a small herring relative rarely longer than five inches, landed in quantity around the British and Baltic coasts. Fresh sprats still appear in winter at fishmongers; the dried, heavily salted kind sold by the string in Victorian shops has largely disappeared from British trade.
- SubstitutesDried salted sprats survive in Baltic, Russian and Turkish groceries, sometimes as smoked kilka or çaça. Failing that, dried salted anchovies or small dried herring behave the same way under boiling water.
- The soakCover the fish generously with fully boiling water and leave three to five minutes, no longer, then drain. The point is to swell the skin so it slips and to draw salt out of the surface; a long soak turns them to mush. Taste one and repeat with fresh boiling water if they are still fiercely salty.
- SkinningDo it while the fish are hot — the skin lifts in one piece from the shoulder down. Once they cool it clings and tears the flesh with it.
- If broiling insteadA hot grill, close to the element, one to two minutes a side. Dried sprats have almost no moisture left to lose and scorch to bitterness quickly. No oil is needed; the fish are oily enough on their own.
- Serving and yieldSix to eight fish per person would suit them as a savoury or with bread and butter, though the entry itself specifies neither quantity nor accompaniment; it only says to serve them very hot. Bones in a sprat this size are soft enough to eat whole.
- Salt budgetEven after soaking these are a salty item. If they go into a larger dish, hold back the salt everywhere else until the sprats are in and you have tasted.
Sprats were among the cheapest sea fish in nineteenth-century Britain, cheap enough that they were sold by the bushel and, notoriously, spread on fields as manure when the catch outran demand. Drying and salting turned a glut into a keeping food, and strings of dried sprats hung in grocers' windows through the winter as a poor man's savoury — the same economic logic that produced Yarmouth bloaters and red herrings from the larger fish of the same family. The brevity here is telling: the entry does not so much teach a dish as explain how to rescue an ingredient the reader already had in the house and found unpleasant. That the best advice available was boiling water and a peeled skin says a good deal about how hard the curing was, and dried sprats faded from British shops thereafter, plausibly as refrigeration and rail made fresh fish cheaper inland.