Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [95]
With the development of refrigeration in the nineteenth century, the red herring disappeared in favour of less harshly cured fish. Henry Sutton of Great Yarmouth still make them, but almost entirely for export to hot countries (although a few delicatessens in this country do stock them for their West Indian customers). They are still required where domestic refrigerators are few. There is even a ‘black herring’ imported by Africa and the West Indies: it will, it seems, stand up to any climate, indefinitely, without cold storage. When I heard that Zimbabwean farmers buy them to supplement the porridgey diet of their black workers, I felt that herrings were still too close reminders of slavery to be comfortable. (Southern American and West Indian plantations once provided a huge market for our hard-cured herrings.)
Cookery books of the past instruct you to soak red herrings in small beer or milk – often poured over them boiling. Hannah Glasse says that two hours should be long enough, which makes me think that our ancestors had a far greater taste for smoky saltness than we have. The herrings were then grilled, or toasted on forks in front of the fire. Butter was used to baste them, or olive oil, which ‘supples, and supplies the fish with a kind of artificial Juices’. Egg sauce, scrambled or buttered eggs, or potatoes mashed and well buttered, mollified the sharp piquant flavour. Cut into strips they could be used like anchovies.
THE BLOATER By comparison, the bloater is a decadent upstart with a pedigree going back a mere three or four centuries. Its lighter cure reflects pleasure, the realization by many ordinary people that eating could be a source of delight as well as survival. The bloater being ungutted, like the red herring, keeps a certain gaminess of flavour, but it has been ‘roused’ in salt for one night only, before being smoked a mere twelve hours. Obviously it cannot be kept without refrigeration which means that until recently it was a speciality of East Anglia. However, as refrigeration is no improver of flavour, it is still true that you need to go to Great Yarmouth, or that part of the coast, to eat bloaters at their best (i.e. no more than thirty-six hours after the cure is finished).
This plumped creature – hence the name bloater or bloat herring, bouffis to the French – is really a mild yet piquant delicacy. Which is what Clara Peggotty, in David Copperfield, meant when she said she was ‘proud to call herself a Yarmouth bloater’. This particular kind of curing has also been developed in Europe, in Holland in particular, and in France, where the harengs saurs from Boulogne are finer even than a Yarmouth bloater.
We usually grill bloaters in England, and serve them with butter. Or we turn them into bloater paste (p. 190). Like salted herring, kippers, etc., they can be used for the hot dishes on p. 198. Do not be dogmatic about cooking them because they taste delicious raw in salads of various kinds. I find that a filleted bloater (pour boiling water over first, leave for a minute, like a tomato, before skinning), mixed with two filleted kippers, make an excellent substitute for the far more expensive matjes herring of the delicatessen counter.
THE KIPPER The mildest of all cured herrings is the kipper. As you would expect, it is the latest comer. John Woodger of Seahouses, in Northumberland, decided in the 1840s to adapt the salmon-kippering process to herrings. He split the fish down the back and gutted it, soaked it briefly in brine – half an hour or more depending on the fatness of the fish – then hung it up on hooks fixed to long rods or ‘tenters’ to be smoked over slow oak fires for six to eighteen hours. His methods are still followed by the small family firm of Robson at Craster down the coast from Seahouses, by a firm or two on Loch Fyne, and by all kipperers on the Isle of Man.
Larger concerns cheat time and loss of weight, and make up for the skill of individual judgement, by dyeing the kippers to various