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Kippered Herrings
Lightly butter a baking tin, then place three fine, fat kippered herrings thereon; spread a few little bits of butter over each fish. Set in the hot oven for ten minutes. Remove, arrange them on a hot dish on toast. Spread a little melted butter over and serve with quarters of lemons.
A method rather than a recipe: the kippers are already cured and smoked, so the oven is only warming them through and melting butter into the flesh.
- "Hot oven"In period usage that means somewhere around 400-450F. Ten minutes at that heat suits whole split kippers; boneless fillets will be done in five to six.
- Buy the right fishA kipper is a herring split, brined and cold-smoked. Look for undyed kippers with a matte bronze skin; the bright mahogany ones have been dipped in colouring and are often more weakly smoked.
- SaltCured kippers vary enormously in saltiness. Taste a corner before adding the melted butter at the end, and skip that second buttering if the fish is a strong one.
- BonesWhole kippers keep the fine pin bones along the flanks. Lift the fillet away from the backbone with a fork at the table rather than trying to bone them beforehand.
- The toastCut it thick and do not butter it heavily; its job is to absorb the smoky butter that runs off the fish. Soft white bread collapses under a kipper.
- YieldThree kippers serves three at breakfast or two at supper. Lemon is not optional here - the acid is what keeps the oily, smoky flesh from cloying.
- SmellBaking kippers perfumes a kitchen for hours. Covering the tin loosely with foil for the first half of the time reduces it somewhat without steaming the fish.
Kippering - splitting, brining and cold-smoking - was applied to herring long before it had that name, but the modern kipper is generally traced to Northumberland in the mid-nineteenth century, and the technique spread quickly once railways could move cured fish inland. Herring were then among the cheapest protein in northern Europe, landed in vast quantities and cured because they were known to spoil quickly; the smokehouse was a preservation trade before it was a delicacy. Their appearance in an international collection like this one reflects the kipper's fixed place on the British and Irish breakfast table, where a cured fish that needed nothing but heat and butter suited a meal cooked early and quickly. Here they are served on toast with lemon quarters.