Independence on a 5-Acre Farm

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The best thing for catching herring is the drift net. The new nylon nets are streets ahead of hemp or cotton, and herring drift nets can be obtained ready made up and hung from Bridport Gundry, Bridport, Dorset. They are expensive but you only need about fifty yards. If you hit lucky such a length will give you all you need. Don't go out at all until you have heard that other fishermen have been getting them in quantity. Let somebody else go out night after night prospecting. When you know the fish are there—out you go, and shoot your net close to the shore, or wherever you think the fish are. Shoot it in a straight line so that it hangs like a wall in the water; hang on to one end of it in your boat and play cards, drink rum or go to sleep. But keep a watch and occasionally cast the boat off from the net and row along a little way and haul some net up to see if there are any fish in it. If not-back to the end and hang on again. The net and you will drift with the tide, hence the name drift net. If the fish really hit you you will know immediately because all the corks of the headline, which is all you can see of the net, will sink. Haul the net up immediately. Pay it into the bottom of the boat, fish and all, don't try to shake the fish out of the net on board. Then row, sail or motor back to port, spread a large sail on the sand beside your beached boat, and overhaul the net over it, shaking it hard to get the fish out into the sail.

We find we need three hundred herring to salt down every year for our family. If we had more we wouldn't eat them. Instead of lashing out money for a boat and a net you might consider just buying your herring direct from a fisherman in a time of glut. My boat is round the south coast this year and so I bought from a man in Fishguard two hundred and fifty small herring for a pound. And if that isn't cheap food I don't know what is! But eschew middlemen, at all times.

Having caught your herring you salt them. We head ours so they don't take up so. much room, but professional "Klondykers" leave the heads on. We scrape the scales off, cut the heads off, put the roes in the deep freeze, whip the guts out (pig bucket of course, although heads and guts we often boil first), wash the fish well, and pack them down in a barrel with dry salt. Enough salt really to cover the fish. You can use an earthenware crock just as well as a barrel of course. Naturally you will cover whatever it is.

We have two ways of eating our salt herring. One is in the way in which herrings are eaten at every street corner in Dutch cities having been sold from those colourful booths which fly the Netherlands flag at every corner, and which advertise in large letters Nieuw Haarring. They are advertised as new to give the customer the impression that they haven't been in the salt since Noah cast a drift net from his Ark, but as most of the customers have a hangover anyway they wouldn't notice, for the "new herrings" are the sovereign remedy for this complaint. How the Dutch merchants make them I do not know, but we make them by soaking the salt herrings overnight if they are still only a week or two old but for twenty-four hours if they have been in the salt longer, skinning the fish and then filleting them. We try to pull the ribs out of the fillets unless we are very hungry and can't wait. Then we just eat them. They are very good indeed, and particularly good on bread and butter, on toast, or as "snacks" at parties.

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