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Omelette with Herrings
Cut off head and tail of a nice fast smoked herring, split in two through back, remove spinal bone and skin, then cut it in very small square pieces; place on a plate with enough milk to cover, let infuse for one hour, remove from milk and drain pieces on a cloth. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add fish and fry for five minutes, tossing once in a while. Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Drop eggs in the fish pan, mix with fork for two minutes and let rest for a half minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre and let rest for a minute, turn on hot dish and serve.
A French-style rolled omelette built on hard-smoked herring, which the milk soak exists to tame. The whole dish takes about ten minutes once the fish has had its hour.
- The hinge: the milk soak"Fast smoked" most likely means a hard-smoked, heavily salted fish — the old red herring or bloater rather than a mild oil-packed fillet — though the book does not explain the term. The hour in milk draws out salt and softens the flesh; skip it and the omelette is likely to be too salty to eat. Taste a scrap of the drained fish before you commit, and give it a second soak in fresh milk if it is still fierce.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup — a generous amount for eight eggs. It makes a soft, loose omelette rather than a firm one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so three of them is roughly 3/4 teaspoon of pepper. That is assertive by current taste; a scant 1/2 teaspoon suits most palates, especially since the herring brings its own punch.
- Sourcing the fishHard-smoked whole herring is now a specialty item found in Northern European, Jewish and Caribbean groceries. Kippers or bloaters work, and need less soaking — thirty minutes is usually enough. Avoid pickled or cream-sauced herring entirely; the vinegar and sauce sit badly with the eggs.
- Salt in the eggsThe half teaspoon of salt assumes properly desalted fish. Season the egg mixture lightly, then correct at the table.
- Pan and heatUse a 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan over medium heat. Frying the drained fish for five minutes in butter is meant to dry it and toast the edges, not brown it hard; keep it moving.
- FoldingThe instruction to fold opposite sides to meet in the centre gives the classic tri-fold French omelette, which should still be slightly moist inside when it leaves the pan. Carry-over heat finishes it on the hot dish.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a light main course, or two generously. For fewer, halve everything and use an 8-inch pan rather than crowding a large one.
Salt and smoked herring were the cheap protein of Northern Europe for centuries — cured on the coast, barrelled, and shipped inland where fresh sea fish never reached — and the omelette was one of the standard ways of stretching a single strong-flavoured fish across a family table. Soaking cured herring in milk before cooking is a very old kitchen habit, and it does two jobs at once: it leaches salt and it blunts the smoke. Dishes of this kind appear throughout the French repertoire as omelette aux harengs, and are often said to have been associated with Lenten and meatless days and with breakfast, when a smoked fish was expected rather than avoided. Its presence in such collections reflects an older confidence that a competent household cook would keep hard-smoked herring on hand as a matter of course — a pantry assumption that has largely disappeared, which is why the fish is now the hardest part of the recipe to find.