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Marinaded Herrings
A German Recipe Put some white salted herrings into cold milk to soak for a couple of hours. Split them open, take out the bones, cut each half-herring into 3 pieces, and divide the roes lengthwise. Put all in layers into a deep jar, and between each layer place a sprinkling of finely minced shallot, pounded cloves, and white pepper, with here and there a piece of bay leaf and a slice of fresh lemon with half the rind taken off. Place the roe with the herring, and the seasoning over the top layer, and cover the whole well with vinegar. Pour 3 or 4 tablespoonfuls of salad-oil over the vinegar, and leave it until required. The pieces of herring should be drained when wanted, and served either with cheese or as a relish for salads, breakfast, luncheon, etc. They may be used in a couple of days, but will keep good for some time.
This is a cold marinade for already-cured fish, not a cooking recipe: the salt of the cure and the acid of the vinegar do all the work. The one thing to get right is the balance between them, since the milk soak deliberately strips salt out and the vinegar has to make up the difference.
- What "white salted herrings" areWhole herrings heavily dry- or brine-salted, sold from the barrel, firm and very salty rather than smoked. The nearest modern equivalents are Dutch or German Salzhering, Scandinavian salt herring, or Polish śledź solony from a deli or Eastern European grocer. Do not substitute fresh herring fillets; they have no cure behind them and this method will not preserve them.
- The milk soakMilk draws out salt and softens the flesh without the flabbiness a long water soak gives. Two hours suits moderately salted fish; heavily salted barrel herring may want four to six hours with a change of milk, and a taste of a small piece will tell you. Discard the milk.
- ParasitesRaw and lightly cured herring can carry Anisakis. Much salt herring sold in Europe and North America has been frozen at the processing stage, which kills it, but this is not guaranteed for every product, so check the label; if it does not say so, freeze the fish at -20C for a week before use.
- Pounded clovesWhole cloves crushed in a mortar. Ground clove from a jar works, but it is stronger and clouds the vinegar, so use a scant pinch per layer. Clove dominates this style of marinade quickly.
- The vinegarUse a 5 percent white wine or distilled vinegar and cover the fish completely; any piece standing proud of the liquid will spoil. Some cooks cut it with a quarter volume of water for a milder result, though that also weakens its preserving effect.
- Jar and oilGlass, glazed stoneware or food-grade plastic only. Vinegar will pit metal and pick up a taste from it. The film of oil on top slows evaporation and keeps air off the surface; it is not a seal, and the jar still needs a lid.
- Storage"Leave it until required" meant a cold larder. Keep the jar refrigerated throughout and eat within two to three weeks; the milk soak has removed much of the salt that once made a room-temperature stand tolerable. Discard if the vinegar goes cloudy or ropy or the fish turns soft.
- LemonThe instruction is to pare half the rind from each slice. The likely point is to leave some zest for aroma while limiting the bitterness a full rind can give a long steep. Pare the peel thinly from one side of each slice.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; scale the fish to whatever deep jar you have, allowing enough vinegar to cover. Drain and blot the pieces before serving with bread or potatoes, or, as the book suggests, alongside cheese or as a relish for salads.
Marinated herring in vinegar with onion, bay and clove is a standard preparation of northern Europe's most important preserved fish, and English cookbooks of the period sometimes labelled it, as here, as "a German recipe" to distinguish it from the native soused herring, which is baked or simmered in vinegar rather than left raw. Salt herring travelled the Baltic and North Sea trade for centuries and was cheap protein far inland, but it reached the kitchen too salty to eat, so a milk or water soak was the usual first step. The vinegar bath that follows is related to the rollmop and to Bismarckhering, the latter traditionally traced to German fish-curers of the 1870s and said to be named for the chancellor. Its filing among relishes for breakfast and luncheon shows the barrel herring as a sharp savoury item on the cold table rather than a Lenten necessity.