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Stuffed Herrings
2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter. 4 large fresh herrings 1 cupful bread crumbs 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 1 egg ozs.) butter Salt and pepper to taste Split the herrings up the back, remove the backbones, lay two herrings open on a buttered fireproof dish; mix together the bread crumbs, parsley, salt, pepper, egg well beaten, and one tablespoonful of the butter; lay this on the split herrings, place the other two on the top, sandwich fashion; put the remainder of the butter on the top, sprinkle with bread crumbs, and bake in a hot oven for twenty minutes.
Serve with parsley sauce. 2 terrapins
A straightforward baked-fish dish that hinges on the boning and on not overcooking. The ingredient list has come through the scanner scrambled, so read it against the method before shopping.
- The garbled ingredient listThe column has collapsed: it should read 4 large fresh herrings, 1 cupful bread crumbs, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley, 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter, 1 egg, salt and pepper. The trailing "2 terrapins" belongs to a neighbouring recipe and has nothing to do with herrings.
- Butter and crumbsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons or about 57 g; one goes into the stuffing, the rest on top. The cupful of crumbs means soft fresh crumbs, not the dry sandy kind sold in canisters, which will drink up the egg and set hard.
- A hot ovenIn books of this period that generally means somewhere in the 400-450F (200-230C) range. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for a sandwich of four herrings; the flesh should be opaque to the bone and the crumb topping browned.
- Boning a herringSplit up the back rather than the belly, open the fish flat skin-side down, then press along the spine with your thumbs and lift the backbone out. Most of the pin bones come with it; any that stay behind are small and edible, though a twenty-minute bake will not soften them much.
- The fireproof dishA fireproof earthenware or glass baking dish, used here uncovered so the top crumbs colour. Butter it well, as the recipe directs: herring skin sticks.
- Parsley sauceThe period accompaniment is a plain white sauce - butter, flour, milk - finished with a good handful of chopped parsley. The fish is rich and the sauce is what carries the salt.
- YieldFour herrings sandwiched in pairs make two generous main-course portions, or four if you cut the sandwiches across and serve with potatoes.
- FreshnessHerring is an oily fish and goes off quickly. Buy it bright-eyed and firm and cook it the same day; anything with a soft belly or a sharp smell should be refused.
Herring was the cheap protein of the British and northern European table for centuries, landed in vast quantities and eaten fresh at the coast, salted or smoked everywhere else. This recipe belongs to the fresh-herring end of that trade, and its treatment - boned, stuffed with a bound crumb forcemeat, baked and served with parsley sauce - is a standard domestic-science handling of a plain fish, the same stuffing that would go into a mackerel or a rolled fillet of plaice. Books of this kind leaned on dishes that could go from oven to table in one vessel, which suited a cheap fish that needed to look like it had been cooked with some care.