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Herring and Mayonnaise
Take some salt herring, a half for each person, and soak them for a day in water. Skin them, cut them open lengthwise, take out the backbone, and put them to soak in vinegar. Then before serving them let them lie for a few minutes in milk, and putting them on a dish pour over them a good mayonnaise sauce.
Sweet Drinks and Cordials. Orgeat Blanch first of all half a pound of sweet almonds and three ounces of bitter, turn them into cold water for a few minutes; then you must pound them very fine in a stone mortar, if you have a marble one so much the better, and do it in a cool place. You must add a little milk occasionally to prevent the paste from becoming oily, then add three quarts of fresh milk, stirring it in slowly, sweeten to your taste, and then putting all into a saucepan clean as a chalice, bring it to the boil. Boil for ten minutes, and then stir till cold, strain it through finest muslin, and then add two good glasses of brandy. Bottle and keep in a dark place.
Two unrelated preparations run together on this page: a cold salt-herring dish, and an orgeat built on three ounces of bitter almonds. The orgeat cannot be made — the reason is below — so read these notes as applying to the herring, with the almond drink flagged as off-limits.
- Why the orgeat is outBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar and soaking in milk accomplishes. Three ounces is well past a trifling amount, and boiling cannot be relied on to drive the cyanide out of a milk emulsion. Raw, unprocessed bitter almonds are for this reason not sold as food in the United States; use a current orgeat or almond-syrup recipe instead.
- Salt herring todayThe whole barrel-cured salt herring assumed here is sold in Scandinavian, Dutch, Polish and Eastern European shops, usually as whole salted herring in brine or as pre-filleted salt herring. Marinated or soused herring in jars is already desalted and acidified and will not survive this treatment; it is a different product.
- Soak in the refrigerator"A day in water" was written for a cold larder. Desalt in the refrigerator, changing the water two or three times, and keep the vinegar and milk stages cold as well. The fish is never cooked; the salt is what has been protecting it, and once that is drawn out the fillet is perishable.
- The vinegar step is the hingeDo not leave the fillets in straight vinegar for long. Twenty minutes to an hour is plenty for a desalted fillet; longer and the acid firms and whitens the flesh into something chalky. Taste a corner rather than trusting the clock.
- What the milk is doingThe few minutes in milk soften the vinegar bite and pull out any last harsh saltiness. Drain the fillets and pat them dry, or the mayonnaise will slacken and slide off on the dish.
- Mayonnaise"A good mayonnaise" here means made by hand with egg yolk, oil and vinegar or lemon — thick enough to coat. If you are using raw yolks, pasteurised eggs are the sensible choice for a dish that will sit on a cold table.
- Yield and servingHalf a herring per person, as the recipe says, works as a first course or part of a cold table. Serve with boiled potatoes, rye bread, sliced onion or capers; it is a cold plate, not a main dish.
Salt herring was the working currency of the North Sea and Baltic for centuries, and Flanders sat in the middle of that trade — the Low Countries were both a fishing and a curing power, and gutted, barrel-salted herring travelled inland where fresh fish could not. Dressing a desalted fillet with mayonnaise rather than the older mustard or vinegar sauces suggests, though it does not prove, a comparatively late version, from a period when mayonnaise is often said to have settled into everyday bourgeois cooking. The book itself is generally described as having been compiled during the First World War to raise money for Belgian relief, with recipes collected from Belgian cooks and refugees; the herring and the orgeat run one into the next here, though that may be no more than a typesetting or transcription artefact. The orgeat is a survival of a much older tradition of almond "milks" and cordials, in which bitter almonds supplied the strong marzipan perfume that manufacturers now get from benzaldehyde flavouring or from apricot kernels processed to remove the toxin.