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Broiled Fresh Herrings
Clean and thoroughly wipe six good-sized, very fresh herrings. Roll them in a tablespoon oil mixed with a teaspoon salt on a plate. Arrange on a broiler and slowly broil for six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish. Spread a tablespoon melted butter over them, decorate with a little parsley greens and six quarters lemon and serve.
A plain grill of whole oily fish, and the technique holds up unchanged. The only real variables are the size of the herrings and the heat of your broiler.
- "Clean" means gutted and scaledThe recipe leaves the preparation to the cook, so gut, scale and trim the fins; heads may stay on or come off. Wiping dry is not fussiness — surface moisture steams the skin instead of crisping it.
- Broiler versus grillIn the period this book comes from, broiling could mean either a hinged wire basket over live coals, turned once, or the broiler of a gas range. Under an overhead domestic broiler, set the rack about 4 inches from the element and preheat it fully; on a gas or charcoal grill, oil the grate well or the skin will tear when you turn them.
- Score the sidesTwo or three shallow diagonal cuts through the skin on each side let the heat into the thickest part and help stop the fish curling. Not in the original, and optional.
- Timing by sizeSix minutes a side suits a herring of roughly 8–10 oz. Smaller fish of 5–6 oz need four minutes a side. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone is opaque and the dorsal fin pulls free easily.
- "Slowly broil"Herring is fatty and the drips flare. Moderate heat rather than maximum keeps the oil rendering steadily instead of scorching the skin before the centre cooks.
- Oil and saltA tablespoon of oil for six fish is a bare film — enough, but brush rather than pour. A teaspoon of salt across six fish is about right; salt them shortly before cooking rather than an hour ahead.
- YieldSix fish serves six as a course, three or four as a main with potatoes. Traditional accompaniments are boiled new potatoes, brown bread, or a mustard butter in place of the plain melted butter.
Herring was the cheap protein of the North Atlantic and North Sea for centuries, salted and barrelled by the million for winter and for export, so a recipe specifying very fresh herrings might be read as quietly making a point: this looks like a dish for a port town or a household with good access to landed fish, rather than for the barrel trade. Grilling is the standard treatment for an oily fish because the fat bastes it from within and the skin crisps without additional grease — the same logic behind grilled mackerel and sardines. The lemon quarters and parsley read as a French restaurant flourish grafted onto what is otherwise a fisherman's supper, which fits what we know of Alexander Filippini's training: he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and wrote The International Cook Book.