No. 2633

Herring Salad with Potatoes

Salade de Harengs et Pommes de Terre

Wash four salted herrings, soak them in milk for several hours, then drain and dry them. Remove the fillets and cut them into half-inch squares; cut into three-eighths inch squares eight ounces of cooked potatoes; add a four-ounce apple, peeled and cored, then minced very finely, half a pound of roasted veal cut in quarter-inch squares, a four-ounce pickled beetroot cut in three-sixteenths inch squares, and four ounces of salt cucumbers cut equally into quarter-inch squares. Put into a salad bowl the potatoes, herrings, apples and veal; season with oil and vinegar, a little hot water or broth (No. 194a), salt, pepper, mustard and some chopped chives, all well mixed; smooth the surface with a knife and decorate it with anchovy fillets, pickled cucumbers, beets, capers, pickled cherries and the yolks and whites of hard-boiled eggs, chopped up very fine, also some chopped parsley.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A composed herring salad in the German-Scandinavian manner, scaled for a hotel sideboard. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the ingredients are named in nineteenth-century trade terms rather than supermarket ones.

Salt herring, not pickledThe recipe means whole salt-cured herring packed in barrels, still sold at Eastern European, Scandinavian and Jewish delis as schmaltz herring; matjes is a milder, younger cure and will need much less soaking. Jarred herring in wine or cream sauce is already seasoned and sweetened; if that is all you can get, skip the soak entirely and cut the dressing's vinegar back.
The soak is the hingeBarrel herring is brined hard enough to be inedible straight from the tub. Several hours in milk draws out salt and softens the flesh; overnight in the refrigerator is better than the couple of hours a warm 1894 larder allowed. Taste a scrap before you dress the bowl, because you cannot pull salt back out afterward.
Salt cucumbersThese are brine-fermented dill pickles, sour rather than sweet, of the kind sold in jars or from a barrel. Ordinary American sweet or bread-and-butter pickles will throw the balance; use kosher dills.
Roasted vealHalf a pound of cold roast veal is a leftover ingredient from a kitchen that always had some. Cold roast pork loin or plain roast chicken breast stands in without upsetting anything; it is there for body and mildness, not flavor of its own.
The broth referenceNo. 194 a points to one of Ranhofer's plain broths; check the number in your own edition rather than assuming which one. A spoonful or two of warm stock, or simply hot water, loosens the oil-and-vinegar dressing so it coats the potatoes instead of pooling. Dress the potatoes while they are still slightly warm and they will absorb it.
Dice sizes are deliberateDice sizes are specified precisely -- Half-inch herring, three-eighths potato, quarter-inch veal and cucumber, three-sixteenths beet. Ranhofer gives no reason for the graded cuts, though they suit the knife-smoothed, decorated surface he asks for. Cut the beet last and on a separate board so it does not stain the rest.
Pickled cherriesA common nineteenth-century preserve, cherries put down in spiced vinegar, now rare. Cornichons, pickled cocktail onions or a few capers extra will carry the same sharp accent on the garnish.
Yield and servingThe listed weights come to something over two pounds before dressing, enough for six to eight as a first course or a buffet dish. Ranhofer gives no chilling time, but a spell in the refrigerator suits it; add the chopped egg and parsley just before serving.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of a great restaurant's repertoire, and its salad chapters take in far more than French cooking. This dish is essentially Heringssalat, the herring, beet, apple and potato salad eaten across northern Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, dressed up with roast veal and a Delmonico-style garnish of anchovy, caper and chopped egg. Salted herring was one of the great preserved staples of the North Sea and Baltic trade, cheap and ubiquitous, and salads of this kind are often said to have belonged to Christmas and New Year tables and to the days of fasting when meat was avoided, though this version's half pound of veal sits oddly with that story. Its appearance in a New York hotel book reflects both the city's large German-speaking population and the fashion for elaborate cold buffet work, where a salad was expected to be smoothed flat and decorated like a mosaic before it left the kitchen.