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Herring Salad, Wilmington
Cut in quarter-inch squares and place in a bowl two skinned and boned, sound smoked herrings, two boiled, peeled, cold, medium potatoes, two peeled and cored sound apples, two cold hard-boiled eggs and pickled red beet. Season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well, wipe the bowl all around and serve.
A cold chopped salad of the German Heringssalat family, and one of the shortest entries in this section. Nearly everything that needs deciding, the original leaves to you.
- Which herring"Sound smoked herring" in Filippini's day usually meant a hard, heavily salted cold-smoked fish that wants soaking in milk or water for several hours before use. If you buy modern hot-smoked kipper fillets or oil-packed matjes instead, skip the soaking and taste before adding any salt to the dressing.
- The unmeasured beetThe recipe names "pickled red beet" with no quantity. One medium beet, diced to match, is in proportion with the two of everything else; more than that and the whole bowl turns pink within an hour.
- The dressingFour tablespoons of "dressing" is left undefined; the recipe assumes you know which dressing is meant, and a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper suits the salad. Four tablespoons is a light coating for this volume, reasonable given that the herring and beet both carry brine.
- PotatoesUse waxy boiling potatoes, cooked in their skins the day before and thoroughly chilled. Floury bakers collapse into paste the moment you fold in the dressing.
- Cut sizeThe quarter-inch dice is not decoration. Everything should be small enough that one spoonful carries fish, potato, apple and egg together, which is the whole point of the dish.
- ApplesA firm tart apple works best; peeled and cored apple browns quickly, so cut it last or toss it in a little of the vinegar from the dressing.
- "Wipe the bowl all around"Reads as a service instruction: clean the smears of beet-stained dressing from the inside rim before the bowl goes to the table.
- Yield and restingServes four as a first course or lunch dish. Half an hour in the refrigerator before serving lets the salt and vinegar move through the potato; much longer and the apple goes soft.
Herring salad is a fixture of German, Dutch and Scandinavian cooking, where chopped salt or smoked herring is stretched with potato, beetroot, apple and egg into something substantial enough to serve as a meal. Filippini's International Cook Book, generally dated to around 1906 to 1911, includes such a dish under a Wilmington label, though what the place name was meant to signal is not clear. The pattern of the dish is older than the label: salted herring was among the cheapest preserved proteins in northern Europe for centuries, and pairing it with cooked potato, sharp apple and pickled beet is the standard way of making a hard, salty fish palatable without cooking it. Versions bound with sour cream or mayonnaise are common in the same tradition; Filippini's calls simply for a dressing, without specifying its makeup.