Pickled Herrings
INGREDIENTS. - 12 salt herrings, 1 oz. of white pepper, 12 peppercorns, 8 shalots, 1 nutmeg, a few small onions, 1 pint of vinegar, some thyme and bay-leaves. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Scale the herrings, take out the roes without cutting the fish more than absolutely necessary, then wash them thoroughly and lay them in milk for 2 days to draw out the salt. Bruise the seasoning, shalots and onions well together, and stuff the fish with part of the mixture; then place them in layers in an earthen jar, covering them PICKLES. with a layer of small onions, thyme and bay-leaves. Boil the vinegar, and stir the roes smooth in it, then pour over the fish.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
Beeton's pickled herrings are a cold pack: salt fish freshened in milk, stuffed with spice, and covered with boiled vinegar. The vinegar is the only thing standing between the jar and the pathogens, and nothing here is measured to a standard that would make that reliable. Read the notes below rather than the method.
- The fish is never cookedSalt herrings are cured, not heated, and the hot vinegar poured over a packed jar of whole stuffed fish will not bring them anywhere near a safe temperature. Everything depends on the salt level in the barrel herring, which is unknowable and which the two-day milk soak is specifically designed to reduce.
- Two days in milkThe recipe gives no temperature for the soak. Two days of fish sitting in milk in a Victorian larder is exactly the condition modern food safety guidance is written against, and it also strips out the salt that was doing the preserving work.
- No measured acidityA pint of vinegar of unstated strength, poured over twelve fish and a jar of raw onion and shallot, gives no controlled pH. Uncooked fish held in a covered jar under weak acid at ambient temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum type E, which is a cold-tolerant marine organism.
- The roesThe roes are stirred into the boiled vinegar and go into the jar with the fish, adding more fish protein to the pack and clouding the liquor, which makes spoilage harder to see.
- ParasitesHerring is a common host for Anisakis. Commercial salting or freezing to defined times and temperatures deals with it; a domestic pickle of unspecified salt content does not.
- ShalotsBeeton's spelling of shallots. The 'few small onions' are listed separately from the eight shalots and are presumably small whole onions of the pickling sort, though the recipe does not say so.
- A pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz, about 2.4 US cups. The 'average cost, 2s' is two shillings for the whole dish of twelve fish, which gives a sense of how cheap herring was.
- If you want pickled herringUse a current, tested recipe with specified salt concentration, vinegar strength and refrigeration, or buy it. Nothing in the original method can be adjusted into safety by eye.
Salt herring was a cheap and widely eaten protein in nineteenth-century Britain, arriving in barrels from the North Sea and Baltic fisheries. The 'seasonable from August to March' note tracks the herring fleet's year rather than the pickling: the fish were caught and salted in autumn and winter and kept in brine until wanted. Soaking heavily salted fish in milk to freshen it is a method recorded in period household books, applied to salt cod and bacon as well, and the milk was said to draw out salt more gently than water and leave the flesh less woolly. Stuffing the fish with spice and covering it with boiled spiced vinegar puts this recipe in the same family as the Dutch and North German rollmops and the older English 'soused herring', though many soused-herring recipes bake the fish in the vinegar in the oven. Beeton's version skips that step, which is where it parts company with modern practice.