Independence on a 5-Acre Farm

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Our other great remedy is to make rollmops of them.

Soak them as above, lay each fish flat on its tummy on a board and press hard down on its back—kneading hard down all along the backbone. Now you can turn him round and pull out the backbone with most of the ribs with it (pig bucket). Now you can just dump the fish into a jar with vinegar and bits of onion, but if you have time and patience it looks prettier to roll each fish up, with a few chips of onion in it, and stick a sharpened match stick through it. Put some pepper corns in the vinegar, and a chilly if you like, cover and put away for a week. Next time you go to a shop enquire the price of rollmops! They will keep about a month, or a bit more.

When the herring are fresh in the salt, say not more than a week in it, I pull them out and hang them in the chimney. I have various cronies whose delight it is to sit around my fireside, late at night, and sop up the home brew they have been drinking by taking these herrings out of the chimney and throwing them on the hot ashes of the fire. After a few minutes they are done and we eat them with our fingers and they are good beyond any telling of it, but then we are probably pretty barbarous people.

The Scottish islanders, and such as live on salt herring for a great part of their diet, I believe soak the salt out of the herring and simply boil them with potatoes. We find them so delicious eaten in the three ways I have described above, and we have so much other meat to eat anyway, that we have seldom experimented with this basic method of cooking. Information on the treatment of salt fish in this country is sorely lacking. There are a score of books which will tell you how to salt fish, but not a single one that I can find that will tell you what to do with them after you have salted them beyond selling them to the Italians. They just know. There is one point I must make about salting herrings: professional salters never head the fish, but "gib" them: that is with one skilful movement of the knife they whip out the gills, the long gut and the stomach, leaving the roe inside the fish. I used to watch the "Scots lassies" doing this at Lowestoft and they did it like lightning. Probably you get a better salt fish this way, for you do not lose the rich oil in the heads, and the fish retains the flavour of the roe. We like herring roe per se though, and since we have had the deep freeze we indulge this taste to the full. Before the deep freeze days we ate roes for days after our little private "herring voyage", and a sprinkling of salt on them would make them keep, in the cold larder, for several days. Vinegar on them would make them keep longer.

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