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Sprats, Pickled
Take a quarter of a peck of sprats as fresh as they can be obtained. Clean them, cut off the heads, and in doing so draw them, and put them into strong brine for an hour. Drain and dry them, and put them in layers into a pickling jar. Between each layer sprinkle salt and salt-petre, and let this be also sprinkled under the first layer and over the last. When the jar is full, press the fish down lightly, and cover the jar closely. The fish may be used in three or four months. The salt may be mixed in the following proportions:--Half a pound of salt, half a pound of bay salt, a table-spoonful of white sugar, an ounce of saltpetre, and a pinch of cochineal. Dry the salt, crush and pound it thoroughly, and mix it with the other ingredidients, and it will be ready for use. When wanted, the pickled sprats may be fried in butter, and served on buttered toasts, or they may be freed from skin and bone, pounded to paste, and covered with clarified butter.
This is a room-temperature salt cure for oily fish, held three to four months before eating, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the units and the ingredients, and where the method fails.
- Why this one failsOily fish salt-cured and sealed in a closed jar at ambient temperature is a recognised risk setting for Clostridium botulinum type E, which is associated with the gut and gills of marine fish and grows without air. Heavy salting inhibits it, but nothing in this process reaches a temperature that would kill it and the salt concentration reaching the flesh is unknown. The toxin cannot be detected by smell or appearance; sustained heat destroys it, but a quick fry months later is no reliable safeguard, and the second serving suggestion — pounded to paste under butter — involves no cooking at all.
- The cure is not measured against the fishSafe salt curing depends on a known salt concentration in the flesh, which means weighing the salt against the weighed weight of fish and holding a controlled temperature. Here the salt mix is simply sprinkled between layers, so the actual brine strength in the jar is unknown and unrepeatable.
- SaltpetreAn ounce of saltpetre in a mix of this size is high by modern standards for nitrate in cured fish, and because the mix is hand-sprinkled rather than evenly dispersed there is no way to calculate how much reaches the flesh. Domestic curing salts today are sold pre-diluted for exactly this reason.
- CochinealA cosmetic addition only; it does nothing for keeping. The likely purpose was the reddish tint associated with cured anchovies.
- A quarter of a peckA peck is eight dry quarts, so this is two quarts of whole sprats by volume, somewhere around 2 to 3 lb depending on the size of the fish. The original never converts it to weight, which is part of the problem.
- Bay saltCoarse solar-evaporated sea salt, sold in large crystals and needing the pounding the recipe describes. Modern coarse sea salt is the nearest thing; the distinction from finer refined salt mattered more then than it does now.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for cured or marinated sprats with weighed cure percentages and refrigerated storage, or buy them already cured.
Sprats are small members of the herring family, landed in enormous cheap quantities along the English east and south coasts through the autumn and winter, and Victorian cookery books generally treat them as the poor relation of the herring rather than a delicacy. The point of a cure like this one was partly preservation and partly imitation: salted, nitrated and tinted with cochineal, sprats stood in for the far more expensive Mediterranean anchovy, and "anchovy" paste and "Norwegian anchovies" sold in Britain were often sprat. That accounts for the two serving suggestions, both borrowed from the anchovy repertoire — fried on buttered toast, or pounded to a paste and sealed under clarified butter, the standard potting method for keeping a savoury spread in a larder without refrigeration.