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One Kippered Herring
Six French Olives. One ounce and a half of fresh Butter. Roll the paste out rather thickly, sprinkle it with grated Parmesan cheese, cayenne pepper, and a very little ground mace; fold together both ends towards the centre, roll out again, and sprinkle as before; fold again, and roll out rather thinly this time. Cut it into fingers about four inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. Cut some strips of kippered herring fillets exactly the same size as the paste, place one of each together and twist them to give them the appearance of a screw; close the ends with your thumb and forefinger, and bake them for a few minutes in a quick oven. These should be dished up in transverse rows, and be served as hot as possible.
Petites Cassolettes à l'Épicurienne. (Little Cases of Lax and Tongue.) Ingredients.
Two ounces of preserved Lax.
Two ounces of cooked Ox-tongue.
A savoury straw of puff pastry twisted with a strip of kipper, from the era when a hot savoury closed the dinner rather than opened it. Everything hangs on getting the pastry and fish strips the same size so they twist together cleanly.
- "The paste"Puff paste, carried over from the preceding recipes in the book. The folding and re-rolling described here is simply laminating the cheese and spice through the dough.
- A quick oven425-450F. These are thin and small; five to eight minutes is enough, and they want watching, as the Parmesan on the surface will colour well before the pastry burns.
- Kippered herringA whole herring split and cold-smoked. Buy ready-filleted kippers and pull the pin bones before cutting strips, or the twists will be unpleasant to eat. Undyed kippers are worth seeking out; the bright mahogany ones are usually dyed.
- Cutting to matchThe hinge of the recipe. Pastry fingers four inches by a quarter inch, and herring strips cut to exactly the same dimensions, so the two twist evenly around each other. Mismatched strips unwind in the oven.
- Ground maceThe dried outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. Still sold ground, though it stales fast; a scrape of nutmeg is the nearest substitute if you have none.
- Sealing the endsPinching with thumb and forefinger is what holds the screw shape. Chill the twists for fifteen minutes on the baking sheet before they go in, or the butter softens and they slump.
- Yield and servingServing -- "Transverse rows" indicates the straws laid in rows crosswise on the dish. They lose their point as they cool.
- The stray lines at the endThe last three lines belong to the next recipe in the book, Petites Cassolettes à l'Épicurienne, and are not part of this one. Lax is cured salmon; the ox-tongue and salmon have nothing to do with the herring straws.
The savoury was a fixed feature of the late Victorian and Edwardian dinner in Britain, a small hot mouthful of something salt, sharp or cheesy served after the sweet and before dessert fruit, and largely a British habit. Kippers gave the cook an intensely flavoured fish that kept without refrigeration, and the split-and-smoked herring is generally traced to Northumberland in the mid-nineteenth century. A single fish, cut into slivers and wound through cheese pastry, stretches across a whole dish of straws. Recipes of this kind, laminating grated Parmesan and cayenne through puff paste, run through the cheese-straw family that fills the savoury chapters of nearly every high-class cookery manual of the period.