Home › The World's Kitchen › Beignets of Herrings
Beignets of Herrings
Remove skin and bones from two smoked herrings, cut in half-inch, slanting, thick pieces, place in a deep dish, cover with cold milk and Jet soak for two hours. Drain on cloth, place on plate, squeeze over juice of half a sound lemon, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, two tablespoons oil, turn well in seasoning and let infuse for fifteen minutes. Prepare a frying batter, roll herrings in it, then drop one by one in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, turning once in a while with a skimmer. Lift up, thoroughly drain on cloth, dress on hot dish with a folded napkin crown-like, decorate with a little parsley greens, six quarters lemon, and serve with a tartare sauce separately.
A fritter made from cured fish, with two steps that carry the whole dish: the milk soak that pulls out salt and smoke, and a fry that the original overstates badly.
- Fry timeTen minutes in hot fat will scorch the batter and dry the fish to string. Battered pieces this size need two to three minutes at 350-375F, until the coating is set and pale gold. The herring is already cured, and cold-smoked fish needs only brief cooking; you are mainly crisping the shell.
- The milk soak is not optionalSmoked herring runs aggressively salty, and two hours in cold milk draws out both salt and some of the smoke. Refrigerate while it soaks and discard the milk. Taste a scrap after draining; if it still stings, give it another hour in fresh milk.
- Which herring"Smoked herring" in this period covered a range of cures and may well have meant a drier, harder fish than today's soft oak-smoked kipper. If you use kippers, cut the soak to about an hour. Bones are numerous and fine; run a finger along the fillet and pull the pin bones with tweezers.
- The frying batterThe recipe does not give one. A plain fritter batter of 1 cup flour, 1 egg, about 3/4 cup beer or milk and a pinch of salt, rested twenty minutes, is the right weight. Add no salt beyond that pinch.
- The oil and lemon stepThis is a short marinade, not a dressing. Fifteen minutes in oil, lemon and parsley seasons the surface; longer and the acid begins to break the flesh down. Blot the pieces before battering or the coating slides off.
- Fat and temperatureAny neutral fat at 350-375F, deep enough for the pieces to float. "Boiling fat" in these books means fat at frying heat, not fat literally boiling. Fry in batches so the temperature holds.
- ServingThe folded napkin was there to absorb grease and to give the pile height; a rack over a warm platter does the job now. Two herrings make a modest platter of fritters; the six lemon quarters suggest the dish was meant to go round six.
- Tartare saucePeriod tartare is a stiff mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot and parsley folded in. Made with raw yolks, it should be kept cold and eaten the same day.
Beignet is simply the French word for a fritter, and this is a French kitchen's answer to a cheap pantry staple: smoked herring, a preserved fish long associated with northern Europe, was inexpensive and turned up in working households. The milk soak, the brief oil-and-lemon infusion, and the tartare sauce are all restaurant-manner refinements laid over that humble base, the sort of upgrading offered to American readers curious about continental practice. The presentation instructions -- fritters piled crown-like on a folded napkin, quartered lemons around the rim, a sprig of parsley -- belong to the service style generally traced to nineteenth-century French professional kitchens, where a fried dish arrived on linen rather than on a bare plate.