No. 788

Smoked Herrings

Harengs Saurs

Suppress the heads and tails from a few nice herring; range them in a flat saucepan moisten them to their height in tepid water, and set the saucepan on the fire, leaving it there till the liquid is very hot, then remove them back. Thirty minutes after drain the herrings, lift off the skin, and wipe them well with a cloth; take out the middle bone; pare the fillets, coat them over with oil and broil them lightly, then range them nicely on a side dish; squeeze over the juice of a lemon, sprinkle them with some good oil, and decorate with branches or chopped parsley at each end, and half slices of lemon around.

← No. 787 Herring, Shad or Mackerel, Marinated Cold Side Dishes No. 789 Paupiettes of Dutch Herrings, Polonaise →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is working with harengs saurs — whole hard-smoked salted herring, not the mild refrigerated fillets sold today. Almost everything in the method exists to pull salt and smoke back to an edible level before the fish ever touches heat.

The soak is the whole recipeHeating the water and then letting the herring stand off the heat for thirty minutes is a desalting step, not cooking. Skip it with genuinely hard-cured fish and the result is inedibly salty; taste a shred of the soaked flesh before proceeding and give them a second soak if needed.
Never let it boil"Leaving it there till the liquid is very hot, then remove them back" reads as bringing the water to just below a simmer and taking the pan off the heat. Hard boiling would be likely to break up the fillets and make skinning and boning harder.
"Suppress" and "pare"Ranhofer's French-inflected English: suppress (French supprimer) means cut off and discard, pare (parer) means trim the fillets to a neat shape.
Flat saucepanA wide, shallow pan — a modern sauté pan or skillet with sides deep enough to hold water at the height of the fish. The point is that the herring lie flat in a single layer.
BroilingIn 1894 this would have meant a gridiron over coals. Under a modern broiler set high, oiled fillets of this thinness need only a couple of minutes until the surface blisters — note that the recipe has already had you lift off the skin. They are already cured and soaked; further cooking only dries them.
"Good oil"Olive oil, then as now the assumed default in this book. Use a fruity one for the finishing drizzle, since it is tasted raw against the lemon.
Buying the fishLook for hard-smoked or salted herring at Eastern European, Scandinavian or Middle Eastern shops. Cold-smoked kippers can be used but are far milder and wetter — cut the soak drastically and check the salt as you go.
Yield and serviceFigure one herring per person as part of a cold hors d'oeuvre spread; the recipe itself only says "a few nice herring." It sits among the Cold Side Dishes, so it is meant to be served cool or at room temperature, dressed shortly before it goes out.

A Little History

Hareng saur is the old French term for herring hard-cured in salt and heavy smoke — saur derives from a Germanic root meaning dry (compare Dutch zoor); the common association with the brownish colour the fish takes on in the smokehouse is traditional rather than established etymology. Preserved herring was for centuries among the cheapest sources of protein in northern Europe, a Lenten and winter staple sold by the barrel, and its appearance in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), written after some three decades in the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, shows how thoroughly a peasant preserve had been absorbed into the restaurant hors d'oeuvre course. The surrounding numbers in this section — marinated herring, shad and mackerel, Dutch herring paupiettes — reflect the large trade in Dutch and Scottish cured herring that supplied American cities in this period. The soak-skin-bone-broil sequence is the classic way of coaxing a barrel fish back toward tenderness, and something close to it is still used where hard-smoked herring is eaten.