Yonder comes yer father, drunk he canna' stand

[venta]

Right...

When doing my shopping today, I bought on a whim some herring for tea. Now, there are some who would describe this as sheer culinary hubris. I have no real grasp of how to cook herring, and the last experiment in that direction (mackerel) was not really a success.

Home, I consulted our recipe-book collection. Rick Stein thought I should make them into fishcakes, which wasn't really what I wanted. Beyond that, everyone was strangely mute on the subject of herring. Except the redoubtable Margeurite Patten, speaking from her dated but invaluable Every Day Cookery; she had lots of ideas, but most of them involved making my herrings into roll mops first.

I decided to improvise, and am now eating what for the sake of argument I'm going to call a fricassé of herring, leek, mushroom and wilted kale in white wine. If I thought you'd let me get away with such pretentious wankery, I might say it was served on a bed of crushed, peppered new potatoes.

I grilled the herring first, then removed the fish from the bones and threw it in the fricassé. This process pretty much underlined why herring has fallen off the menu: in the same way that people now rarely buy shin beef when they can afford steak, you woudn't buy herring when salmon is so cheap. It takes time, and effort. Deboning herring is an unmitigated faff. It is also a snare and a delusion: despite endless painstaking work on my part, as I sat down with my finished meal I observed it bristling with fine bones.

I hate fishbones. I love fish in all forms, from sashimi to cod and chips. I don't care, in general, how gruesome and tentacular my seafood gets. But I hate eating even the tiny, thread-like bones which are alledgedly perfectly harmless.

Am I just doomed never to enjoy herring, kippers, and their like ? The mother tells me that the kippers from The Whitby Catch are quite remarkably bone-free (can hendybear confirm ?) I'll believe it when I see it... kipperz meanz bonez in my experience. As it happens, the fricassé worked out quite well, I'm just not sure it's quite nice enough to justify the fiddliness involved in cooking and the vigilance involved in eating it.

Do any of you cook herring, mackerel or other small awkward oily fish ? If so, what do you do with them ?


[*] The original title of Salt'n'Pepa's '91 single. It was changed after a conversation with their marketing department.

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I get small mackerel, gutted and de-headed and tailed, wrap them in greaseproof paper on their own and put them in a 190 degree oven for 30 minutes. Then I get them out, put some honey inside, finish faffing with the rest of the meal and eat them whole, skin and all, without taking any bones out at all. I usually find about 2 small bones but can eat the rest. They are absolutely lovely (and the skin is crunchy).

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, so presumably who ever did the de-heading and de-tailing also removed quite a lot of bones ? Or maybe you hust have a much higher bone-eating tolerance than I do.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I don't know...I will have a look when they are raw and see if I can see a backbone. It feels like it still has one. Or maybe yes, they have had the bones taken out by magical bone-removing technique. I get the ones from Sainsburys that come in a tray with 2-3 for £1.50, because there isn't a fish counter.