Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [242]
We can choose the night, the month, the fish. We can avoid humidity, that enemy of drying food. We can eat wind-drieds as a delicious variation to our everyday diet. This and other curing methods, though, belong to early communities of the prehistoric Atlantic coast. They depended on them to survive the winter. They had to dry fish precisely as and where it was caught; mainly I suppose in the early summer, when salmon and sturgeon leapt up the rivers in a profusion we now find unimaginable. Even allowing for the different climate, I imagine that this was as much a period of changing humidity as it is today, so it became necessary to help the drying along artificially by fire. Wind-blown salmon, smoked salmon – what a feast.
Fish was dried on a large scale until recently in Scotland, and it still is in communities which are cut off from regular supplies in the winter; in Shetland today, washing-lines of split and salted piltock (saithe) are pegged out in the summer winds, until they are stiff and hard enough to be put by in boxes. A good description of the traditional method was given by Marian McNeill in The Scots Kitchen. Whiting were the favourite fish, and they were not always cured for long keeping. They might just be dipped in salt, and hung up in a draughty passage (as a native of the north-east coast of England, I begin at last to see the point of that hard north-eastern wind forever blowing – from Siberia, according to my mother, who rubbed cold cream gently on her peeling skin every night. Obviously she should instead have been hanging fish up to dry).
Next day these blawns – i.e. blown whiting – would be eaten for breakfast, grilled or boiled, with butter; barley bannocks, wheat scones and tea were put on the table as well. Alexis Soyer, the famous chef of the Reform Club in the mid-nineteenth century, considered that they made a fine and delicate breakfast dish. This was not the opinion of Dr Johnson. Boswell once insisted on ‘scottifying his palate’ with just a taste of one of these dried whiting which were habitually on sale in London. Johnson let ‘a bit of one of them lie in his mouth. He did not like it.’
It surprises me that Dr Johnson should have found blawns so strange, because Hannah Glasse gives instructions for curing mackerel in the sun in the 1758 appendix to The Art of Cookery. There is nothing to indicate that her instructions would seem odd to her middle-class readers. The mackerel were opened down the back and cleaned – like kippers or Finnan haddock – then salted and laid out to dry ‘on inclining stones facing the sun; never leaving them out when the sun is off, nor lay them out before the sun has dispersed the dews, and the stones you lay them on be dry and warm. A week’s time of fine weather perfectly cures them.’
Hannah Glasse came from the north of England, near Hexham. Perhaps she learned to cure fish up there. Her technique puts me in mind of the way speldings were cured in Aberdeenshire, according to Catherine Brown in Scottish Regional Recipes. They began life as haddock, surplus haddock to the requirements of fresh eating or transformation into lightly cured and short-lived Finnan haddies. They were split and gutted – heads left on – and then soaked in a strong brine. They were laid out on ‘smooth pebbles on the beach during the day. If it rained they had to be brought in. After a few days, as they hardened, they were pressed with more flat stones. The drying process took about a week, depending on the size of the fish, and at the end of it they were a greenish-red colour and quite hard.’
Sillocks in Shetland were immature coalfish or saithe that were cleaned and washed in salt water and hung up in bunches outside, until