Herrings to your good health

While herring was once considered the food of the poor, it is now being served in impossibly hip Noma. Try them for yourself, writes JOHN McKENNA

THERE ARE three good reasons to eat herrings, which are currently being fished by Irish boats and which you will find in fish shops.

Firstly, they are very good for you.

Secondly, René Redzepi serves a dish of “Pumpkin and Marinated Herring, Walnut Juice” in his impossibly hip Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. So, if you want to be in with the In Crowd, herrings are a must.

Finally, if we ate more herrings, we might remember Dean Swift’s great poem from 1746:

Be not sparing,

Leave off swearing,

Buy my herrings

Fresh from Malahide,

Better was never tried.

Come eat ’em with pure fresh butter and mustard, Their bellies are soft, and as white as custard.

Come, sixpence a dozen to get me some bread,

Or, like my own herrings,

I too shall be dead.

It’s a great verse, lusty and sensual, with the true mongers’ rhythms, but it hasn’t managed to persuade us to fall in love with the herring as part of our modern diet.

While the Northern European and Scandinavian diet revered the herring, the Mediterranean diet favoured cod, and we seem to have been sandwiched somewhere in the middle, revering neither fish, but with a bias against herring and a preference for cod.

Long-lived folk memories may have played their part in herring’s downfall. The herring was part of the diet of the poor: when threepence would buy you a fat salmon back in the 17th century, it would net you 100 herring.

Later, herring would be indelibly associated with lenten fasting, so much so that as Easter approached butchers would hold mock funerals of a herring, or they would hang herrings on a rod and whip the herrings with sticks as they paraded through the streets of the towns – which reportedly included Drogheda, Dundalk and Cork – to announce that meat was back on the menu, and the fast was finished. Poor herring!

And what does someone do if they wish to mislead you? They sell you a red herring.

So, let’s come to the rescue of herring. They are delicious fish: fresh, you should coat them in oatmeal, fry them in bacon fat and eat them with boiled potatoes. Here is a recipe for the oatmeal-fried herring.

Oatmeal-fried herring with bacon

For each person:

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon oatmeal

2 herrings, filleted

Generous knob of butter

2 rashers of smoked bacon

Lemon wedge

Parsley

Put the salt and pepper and oatmeal on to a plate and press the herring fillets down on top. The oatmeal should stick to the fish.

Melt a generous knob of butter in a frying pan and fry the bacon until just crisp. Remove the bacon and keep warm.

Place the fish, flesh side down in the bacon-buttery juices and cook for approximately three minutes. Turn over and cook for a further three minutes or until the herring is cooked.

Put the herring and bacon on the plate and drizzle over any pan juices that remain.

Serve garnished with a lemon wedge and a sprinkling of parsley. This dish goes equally well with boiled potatoes or buttered slices of brown soda bread.

John McKenna is author of the Bridgestone Guides, bridgestoneguides.com