Home › The Principles of Cookery › SPRATS, PICKLED (another way)
SPRATS, PICKLED (another way)
Take a number of small sprats, cut off the heads, and wash the bodies well. Strew a quantity of salt over them, and let them lie in a pan all night. Take them out next day, and wipe them well. Then put in a stone jar, or in an iron saucepan, a quantity of vinegar in proportion to the quantity of sprats. If the vinegar is in a stone jar, put it into an oven to boil; if in an iron vessel, place it over the fire. Put into the vinegar a bunch of parsley-root, some tarragon leaves, a sprig of thyme, one of marjoram, an onion stuck with cloves, and four or five shallots. Let the vinegar boil with these herbs, then strain it into another stone jar, and let it get cold. Meanwhile, have ready some wide-mouthed pickle or anchovy bottles. Put a layer of sprats at the bottom of each bottle, then a bay-leaf, then a pinch of salt, a grain or two of allspice, and a few peppercorns; then another layer of sprats; and so on until the bottles are full. Then fill them with the vinegar when it is quite cold. Cork the bottles, put bladder over the corks, and sealing wax upon the bladder. In six months the fish will be fit for use. Smelts pickled in the same way are admirable.
This is a raw-fish preserve sealed for half a year at room temperature, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the specific failures and translate the vocabulary of the original.
- The fish is never cookedThe sprats are salted overnight, wiped, and then covered with vinegar that the recipe explicitly requires to be quite cold. Nothing in the process brings the flesh to a temperature that would destroy pathogens or the parasites (Anisakis and relatives) common in small marine fish.
- No measured acidityThe vinegar is specified only as "a quantity in proportion to the quantity of sprats," and it has been boiled with roots, onion and herbs, which dilute and buffer it. Safe cold pickling of fish depends on a known acetic acid concentration reaching the centre of the flesh; here it is unknowable.
- Salt that is not a cureOne night under loose dry salt, followed by wiping, does not lower water activity enough to preserve raw fish. Traditional sprat and anchovy cures used heavy salt over weeks and a controlled cool store, neither of which this recipe provides.
- Sealed, airless, and warmSealed and airless — Corks covered with bladder and sealing wax create exactly the low-oxygen environment in which Clostridium botulinum — including the cold-tolerant type E strains associated with fish — can produce toxin. The recipe gives no storage instruction; six months unrefrigerated compounds the risk rather than reducing it, and type E's cold tolerance means even a cool larder is no safeguard.
- "In six months the fish will be fit for use"This is the hinge of the recipe and the reason it fails. The long wait was understood as ripening; in fact it is an unrefrigerated incubation with no acid, temperature or salt control to stop anything growing. If you want pickled sprats or herring, use a current tested recipe with weighed salt, measured vinegar strength, prior freezing where required, and refrigerated storage.
- Vessels and termsA "stone jar" is glazed stoneware; the recipe offers it or an iron saucepan interchangeably, and the stoneware jar is heated in the oven rather than over the fire, presumably to avoid cracking it on direct flame. "Bladder" is dried animal bladder, a common airtight covering over a cork. A "grain" of allspice here appears to mean one berry rather than the apothecary's weight.
- SmeltsThe closing line extends the method to smelts, another small whole fish. The same objections apply in full — the problem is the process, not the species.
Sprats were among the cheapest fish in Victorian Britain, landed in vast winter shoals in the Thames estuary and along the East Anglian and Kentish coasts and sold by the bushel for a few pence. Because they are small, oily and spoil quickly, much of the catch was preserved by smoking, salting, or pickling in spiced vinegar, and pickled sprats were sometimes sold as, or alongside, anchovies. The aromatics here, parsley root, tarragon, thyme, marjoram, a clove-stuck onion and shallots, belong to the same family of spiced vinegars used across northern Europe for herring, and sealing a cork under bladder and wax was an ordinary domestic closure in a period when commercial tinning was beginning to displace it. The confidence that six months in a sealed bottle would improve rather than endanger the fish reflects a period in which anaerobic spoilage was not yet understood.