Herring Salad
Soak over night three Holland herrings cut in very small pieces; cook and peel eight medium potatoes, and when cold chop with two small cooked red beets, two onions, a few sour apples, some roasted veal, and three hard-boiled eggs; mix with a sauce of sweet-oil, vinegar, stock. pepper, and mustard to taste. A table-spoon of thick sour cream improves the sauce, which should stand over night in an earthen dish. - Mrs. H. C. Mahncke.
A German-style herring salad of the kind that turned up on late nineteenth-century supper tables, built on salt-cured fish, cold potatoes and leftover roast. The quantities are given loosely, and the flavour depends almost entirely on how well the herring is desalted.
- Holland herringsWhole salt-cured herring packed in barrels, imported from the Netherlands. Modern equivalents are the salted herring fillets sold in Eastern European and Scandinavian shops, or matjes fillets in brine, though matjes is a milder cure. Herring already packed in wine or cream sauce will not work here.
- The overnight soak is the hingeBarrel-salted herring is aggressively salty and must be soaked in several changes of cold water, or in milk, before it goes anywhere near a bowl. Taste a sliver before you assemble; if it is still harsh, keep soaking. Nothing later in the recipe can rescue oversalted fish.
- Sweet-oilPeriod term for edible olive oil, as opposed to lamp oil or medicinal oils. A mild olive oil or a neutral oil both suit the dish; a peppery modern extra-virgin will fight the vinegar.
- StockA spoonful or two of cold meat or veal stock, used to loosen and enrich the dressing. The recipe leaves the proportions to taste; add stock until the sauce coats rather than clings.
- Roasted vealThis is a leftovers dish, and the veal is whatever remains of a roast. Cold roast pork, chicken or beef stands in without complaint; the meat is there for body, not for its own flavour.
- Sour applesA firm tart cooking apple, unpeeled or peeled as you like, chopped small. Granny Smith or Bramley gives the sharpness intended. Toss it with a little of the vinegar as you go so it does not brown before the salad is dressed.
- The earthen dish and the overnight restBeets, vinegar and salt attack reactive metal, so use glass, ceramic or stainless steel rather than aluminium or bare cast iron. The instruction reads ambiguously, but the sense is that the dressed salad rests overnight refrigerated, which is when the beet colour bleeds through everything and the flavours settle.
- YieldEight potatoes, three herrings and a share of roast meat make a large bowl, enough for eight to ten as a first course or supper dish. It keeps two or three days cold and is generally better on the second day.
Herring salad in this form is a German household dish, Heringssalat, close cousin to the Swedish sillsallad, and its appearance in an American community compilation of the 1880s reflects the contribution of German-speaking immigrant kitchens. The contributor's name, Mrs. H. C. Mahncke, points the same way: these community cookbooks gathered recipes by attribution, and immigrant kitchens supplied dishes that the wider American table had not yet met. Salt herring was one of the cheapest preserved proteins available inland before refrigeration, shipped in barrels and kept for months, which is why so many nineteenth-century recipes open with an overnight soak. The beet-stained pink salad was traditionally a winter and holiday dish in northern Europe, often served around Christmas and New Year, and it survives in that role in Scandinavia still.