Herrings, Red
May be cooked in in the same way as bloaters, but, as they are very salt, they should be soaked some time in cold water first.
A cross-reference entry rather than a full recipe: the method is the bloater method, with a long soak added because red herrings are cured hard and very salty. The soak is the whole point.
- What a red herring isA whole herring, gutted or not, heavily dry-salted and then cold-smoked for days or weeks until the flesh is firm, dark and keeping-dry. It is a different article from a bloater (lightly salted, briefly smoked, still soft) or a kipper (split, brined, cold-smoked). Little of the true hard-cured sort is sold now; a shop selling salt fish is the likeliest source.
- "Soaked some time"The vagueness reflects how variable the cure was. For a hard-smoked whole fish, start at 8 to 12 hours in plenty of cold water, changing it two or three times; a lightly cured one may need only 2 hours. Taste a shred of the flesh before you cook it, because there is no correcting the salt afterwards.
- Cooked "in the same way as bloaters"That usually means split down the back, opened flat, brushed with butter or oil and grilled or dry-fried skin side first. Under a hot grill it takes roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side; a soaked red herring is drier than a bloater and dries further with overcooking.
- No added saltNothing in the seasoning stage needs salt: no salt in the butter if you can help it, and none in whatever accompanies it. Pepper, a squeeze of lemon and mustard butter are the traditional and still the best treatment.
- An alternative to grillingAnother handling sometimes used for hard salt fish is to pour boiling water over the soaked fish, stand it for 5 to 10 minutes off the heat, then drain and butter it. This draws out more salt and suits a very hard cure; it will not brown, so it is a plainer dish.
- YieldOne fish per person as a breakfast or supper dish. Because of the smoke and salt the flavour carries a long way, so half a fish is enough alongside eggs or potatoes.
- Bones and skinWhole-cured herrings keep every pin bone. Grill them on the bone, then lift the fillets away from the backbone at the table; the flesh comes off cleanly once cooked and the effort is much less than trying to bone the raw fish.
Red herrings were the great keeping fish of medieval and early modern Europe: salted and smoked until they would travel unrefrigerated for months, they fed armies, ships and inland towns, and Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast built its fortune on the trade. The colour comes from long exposure to smoke, which turns the skin a deep reddish brown. The figure of speech comes from the fish rather than the other way round — the strong-smelling cured herring is generally said to have been drawn across a trail to distract hounds.