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Yarmouth Bloaters
Cut off the head and tail, open the bloater down the back, and lay it flat. Broil it on both sides over a clear fire, and serve with a little fresh butter and a captain's biscuit, which has been heated in the oven. (See BLOATERS.)
A one-line Victorian breakfast dish that assumes you know what a bloater is and that you own a gridiron. Both need a word.
- What a bloater isA whole herring, salted only briefly and cold-smoked ungutted, so it stays plump and mild rather than dry and dark like a kipper. It is a short-keeping fish, and the roe and gut give it the faintly gamey flavour that was the whole point. Fresh bloaters are now largely a specialist purchase; a whole undyed kipper is the nearest common substitute, though it is saltier and smokier.
- Cooking it, not warming itBloaters are cold-smoked, which means the smoking never cooked them. They must be cooked through here, not merely heated: 3 to 4 minutes a side under a hot grill or on a ridged pan until the flesh is opaque to the bone and the skin blisters.
- "A clear fire"An open coal or wood fire burnt down past the smoking stage to steady red heat, with no flame licking the fish. A grill or broiler preheated for a good five minutes on high gives the same thing; keep the fish 3 to 4 inches from the element.
- Opening it down the backSplitting along the backbone and laying the fish flat, skin down, gives an even thickness and lets the heat reach the thickest part. Do the cooking mostly on the flesh side, then a brief turn on the skin to crisp it. Grease the grid or rack first, or the skin will weld to it.
- Captain's biscuitA plain, thin, unsweetened flour biscuit, finer than ship's hardtack and often eaten at breakfast. A water biscuit or a plain cracker warmed briefly in a moderate oven stands in for it.
- Gutting and roeTraditional Yarmouth bloaters were cured whole and are usually still ungutted. The innards can be removed after splitting, keeping the soft or hard roe, which can be laid back on the fish for the last minute of grilling.
- Salt and butterModern bloaters vary a good deal in salt. Taste a flake before adding butter; if the fish is aggressively salty, soak it in cold milk or water for 20 minutes and pat dry before splitting. The "little fresh butter" is unsalted butter, put on off the heat so it melts rather than browns.
- YieldOne bloater per person as a breakfast or high-tea dish, with the biscuit. No side is expected beyond that.
Great Yarmouth built its wealth on the autumn herring shoals of the North Sea, and by the nineteenth century the town's smokehouses were curing fish by the hundreds of thousands of barrels. The bloater is the lightest of those cures: a night or so in salt, a short cold smoke, no gutting, and a fish that keeps only a few days and travels only as far as the railway can carry it quickly. The name is often said to come from the same root as "bloat", for the swollen look the fish takes on in curing, though the earlier "bloat herring" may instead descend from a word meaning soft or soaked; the invention of the mild Yarmouth cure is traditionally credited to a local curer named Bishop early in the nineteenth century, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented. The recipe's brevity, and the cross-reference to a longer entry under BLOATERS, tells you how ordinary the fish was on a late-Victorian breakfast table — alongside the captain's biscuit, itself a survival of the plain hard biscuits of the merchant and naval service.