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Smoked Herrings
Clean the herrings well and let them lie for one night in salt, with a small quantity of saltpetre mixed with it. The next day run a stick through the eyes, and in this way thread them all. Have ready a cask of sawdust with a red hot heater in the center of it; fix the stick over this so that the herrings hang in a row in the middle of it, and smoke them for twenty-four hours.
This is a nineteenth-century cold-smoking method written for a household that already knew what it was doing, and it omits every number that now matters. It cannot be followed safely as printed.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured"A small quantity" of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) tells you nothing. Curing nitrate is dosed by weight against the weight of the fish and the salt, in the low hundreds of parts per million; guessing at it risks both an ineffective cure and a genuinely harmful overdose. Modern curing salts are pre-diluted precisely because eyeballing the pure chemical is dangerous.
- The salt cure is also unmeasuredOne night in loose salt gives no controlled salt uptake and no stated brine strength or temperature. Salt concentration in the finished flesh is the main barrier keeping a smoked fish safe, and here it is left entirely to chance.
- Cold smoke and Clostridium botulinumA red-hot heater buried in sawdust in a cask produces smoke at ambient to warm temperatures, not cooking heat. Fish held for twenty-four hours in that range, in the low-oxygen environment of a smoker and then of storage, is the classic setting for C. botulinum type E, which grows at refrigerator temperatures and produces a toxin you cannot see, smell or taste.
- Nothing ever reaches a safe temperatureThe herring is never heated to any internal temperature at all. Parasites and surface bacteria from the gut cavity are controlled here only by the salt, and the salt is not specified.
- The vesselA wooden cask packed with sawdust and a red-hot iron is a fire hazard as well as a food hazard. Sawdust smoulders unpredictably, and the cask itself can take light.
- If you want smoked herringUse a current, tested recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern smoking manual, one that gives brine strength, cure weight, smoker temperature and holding time as numbers. Or buy kippers and bloaters, which are made under controlled conditions.
- On the historical detailThreading the fish through the eyes onto a stick, or speet, is a traditional method of hanging herring for smoking. It is worth knowing as a piece of technique even though the process around it should not be reproduced.
Smoked herring was one of the great preserved foods of the North Atlantic, the cheap protein that provisioned ships, armies and Lenten tables from the Middle Ages onward, and the trade shaped ports from Great Yarmouth to Bergen. The heavily cured, long-smoked "red herring" of this recipe is the older type, dry and salty and keepable for months without ice; the milder split kipper is generally dated to the middle of the nineteenth century, and the plump bloater is a lighter cure of roughly that era or a little earlier, with faster boats and rail transport making such perishable cures commercially practical. That such a rustic cask-and-sawdust method turns up in a hotel cookbook says something about the era's cookbooks generally: Oscar Tschirky's volume reads less as a record of hotel practice than as a broad compendium, sweeping in farmhouse and household procedures alongside the à la carte dishes.