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Yarmouth Bloaters
Select six fine, soft, fat Yarmouth bloaters. Split them through the back without separating. Arrange on a double broiler and broil for five minutes on each side, or until of a nice brown. Dress on a hot dish; spread a very little melted butter over each. Decorate the dish with parsley greens and serve with six small quarters of lemon.
A bloater is a whole herring, ungutted, lightly salted and briefly cold-smoked, so this is really a lesson in handling a cure that has largely disappeared from fishmongers' slabs.
- What a bloater isUnlike a kipper, a bloater is not split before curing and is not gutted. The short, mild smoke leaves it soft and only faintly salty, with a gamey note from the retained innards, and it does not keep more than a couple of days refrigerated.
- If you cannot find themBloaters are still cured in small quantities in East Anglia but are rare elsewhere. Whole hot- or cold-smoked herring is the nearest thing; kippers work but are saltier, drier and already split, so cut the cooking time.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. This is a hinged wire fish grill that clamps the fish between two grids so it can be turned in one motion without breaking. A fish basket for the barbecue does the same job, or use a foil-lined sheet under the broiler and turn with two spatulas.
- Splitting through the backCut along the backbone from the head end, keeping the belly skin intact so the fish opens flat like a book. This is also the moment to lift out the gut and the backbone if you would rather not deal with them at the table; leave the roe or milt, which is the best part for many people.
- Heat and timingFive minutes a side implies a fairly moderate fire rather than a fierce one. Under a modern gas or electric broiler set high, four to five inches from the element, expect three to four minutes a side. Herring is oily and the skin blisters and burns quickly once it colours.
- Butter, and not muchThe instruction to spread "a very little" melted butter matters. Bloaters carry a great deal of their own oil, and a heavy hand makes the dish cloying rather than rich.
- YieldSix bloaters serves six as a breakfast or supper dish, one fish each, with brown bread and butter. The lemon is not decoration; the acid is what makes a whole oily smoked herring palatable.
- VentilationBroiling smoked herring indoors perfumes a kitchen for a day or more. Extractor on full, or cook them outside.
The bloater is the signature cure of Great Yarmouth, the Norfolk port that stood at the centre of the English herring fishery; through the nineteenth century and up to the First World War the autumn herring voyage drew hundreds of boats and thousands of Scots women hired to gut and pack the catch. The name is generally traced to a Scandinavian root meaning soft or soaked, describing a fish cured just enough to keep for a few days rather than for months, and the plump, ungutted appearance of the finished herring reinforced the association with "bloated". Because it was neither split nor gutted, the bloater was probably cheaper and quicker to produce than the kipper, and it was eaten close to where it was made, which is why it reads as a regional specialty. Its near-disappearance tracks the collapse of the North Sea herring stocks and of the curing yards that depended on them.