No. 789

Paupiettes of Dutch Herrings, Polonaise

Paupiettes de Harengs de Hollande a la Polonaise

Unsalt some herrings for a few hours, remove their white skin, and serve them after cutting them across in four, and reshaping them again, or else split them in two lengthwise, and pare them into oblongs. Pound the trimmings in a mortar with a few anchovy fillets, as much butter as fish but no salt, add lemon juice, then rub through a sieve, and add some finely chopped chervil, tarragon and chives; spread a layer of this preparation inside each herring fillet, roll them up cylindrical shape, and dip the ends in hard boiled chopped up eggs, one in the white and the other in the yolk, and dress them on a side dish, garnishing with fine herbs, and around with beets and capers.

← No. 788 Smoked Herrings Cold Side Dishes No. 790 Horseradish →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer assumes you have bought whole salt-cured Dutch herring from a barrel and will do the desalting yourself. Everything else is knife work and a compound butter.

"Unsalt" means soakBarrel-cured Dutch herring is packed hard in salt and must be soaked in cold water, or water and milk, for several hours with a change or two of liquid. Taste a scrap before you go further; the fish should read as seasoned, not saline.
Which herring to buyLook for salted maatjes or matjes herring, sold in jars, vacuum packs or from a Dutch or Eastern European counter. Buy a product that has been commercially frozen at some stage, which is now standard practice for herring eaten uncooked and deals with the parasite question the original never raises.
The white skinHe means the thin silvery membrane over the fillet, which peels away readily from the tail end once the fish has soaked. Take out the fine pin bones at the same time.
The filling is a compound butterEqual weights of herring trimmings and softened butter, a few anchovy fillets, lemon juice, no added salt. A small food processor replaces the mortar and sieve; push it through a fine sieve afterwards anyway if you want the texture Ranhofer intended.
Add the herbs lastChervil, tarragon and chives go in after sieving, chopped fine. Blitzing them with the butter turns the mixture grey-green and dulls the tarragon.
PaupietteA thin fillet spread with forcemeat and rolled; here it is served cold rather than braised. Chill the rolls firm before dressing them, or the butter softens and they slump on the dish.
Polonaise, in this contextNot the buttered-crumb garnish of vegetable cookery but the hard-boiled egg treatment: white and yolk chopped separately, one end of each roll dipped in each, so the platter reads white and yellow.
YieldRanhofer gives no quantity. Six herrings split lengthwise give twelve fillets and so twelve rolls, which would serve about six as part of a cold table. It is a side dish in the old sense, one of several set out at once.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in the cold side dishes of The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where a cold buffet was expected to include a herring or two alongside the caviar and the smoked salmon. Salted Dutch herring was an international commodity long before it was a delicacy: the Dutch herring fishery, with its practice of gutting and salting the catch aboard the boat, underwrote the country's trade from the late Middle Ages onward, and barrels of it moved across Europe and the Atlantic. The polonaise label attached to sieved hard-boiled egg is French kitchen shorthand of the period rather than a claim of Polish origin, and it is applied loosely in nineteenth-century menus; the chopped-egg garnish and the beetroot around the dish do, though, point at the broader Baltic and Central European taste for cured herring dressed with egg, beets and sour notes that Delmonico's clientele would have recognised.