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Graeme Rigby, "Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring" (Hurst Publishers, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about many, many things, all related to herring, the fish. Yes, we are talking today about the book titled Rigby's Encyclopedia of the Herring Adventures with the King of Fishes, published in the UK by Hearst in 2025 and soon to be out in the US with Oxford University Press. Now, as the title encyclopedia suggests, we have a lot to cover here. There is everything you could ever want to know about the herring, things you didn't even imagine could be related. Obviously, we're not going to be able to cover everything, but we'll have a good go at discussing this king of fishes with the expert himself. Graham Rigby is here to tell us everything there is to know about the herring. He is the author of this book. Thank you, Graham, so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:05]
C
Well, thank you for having me.
- [02:07]
B
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write a book about Harrowing and make it as expansive as an encyclopedia?
- [02:18]
C
I'm a writer in my 70s now and, oh, back in the late 90s, I was commissioned by Radio 4, BBC Radio 4 for, to make a. A program about Bombay duck, which is dried fish from. From. From India, which you couldn't get at the time to do with various complications with the European Union. And I came back with my tapes from. From India, and they said they wanted a series. And so I said, oh, yes, yes, sure, sure, of course I can do that. I'll do an un. Preserved fish. And so I did a series of five radio programs, the last of which was about red herring. And I wasn't really ever happy with it because I just never got to the bottom even of. Of red herring, let alone herring generally. So I came out of it and thought, well, I'll write an encyclopedia of the herring. And I started to do it, and it wasn't really an encyclopedia, but I was calling it an encyclopedia. But I had an agent at the time, and he said, well, why don't you do a proper encyclopedia? Which was quite a daunting prospect, really, because I'm not a specialist in all of this territory. But the kind of logic of it just became irresistible really. So I started to work on it and other things got in the way, but I just carried on just researching and researching, writing little bits, translating things, and just kept going. And then when I retired, I. I did. I thought, well, okay, now I'll set up a website. So I did a kind of an encyclopedia blogging website, and then I did some podcasts. And then Hearst, the publishers approached me saying, was I interested in doing a book? And at first I wasn't absolutely certain because the thing about writing a book is that it's almost like you're saying, okay, this is it. This is everything, as you've said, everything you need to know about herring, which it isn't, because there's so much that. That I kind of was slightly worried, but what was I going to do with the rest of my life? But then again, I. I was thinking, well, you know, I'm in my 70s now. Yeah. How much longer have I got? It's. It would be. It would be foolish not to. Not to take this opportunity. And it just opened up a whole new set of things just because in checking all the stuff I'd done, I kept on coming across more and more information. So, yes, that's really. That's how it came to be. And it's been sort of 27 years in the. In the making. So, yeah, yeah.
- [05:43]
B
I mean, for something to be called an encyclopedia does suggest rather a lot of work and effort went into it. So I'm not surprised to hear about the backstory in this case. And even just that short answer there to start us off has already given me a whole bunch of things I want to ask about starting, I think, with you mentioned red herrings, which I think we usually just think of as a metaphor, not a real thing. So we should probably do some myth busting when we talk about herrings. Is there just one kind in the whole world? Are there actually red herrings?
- [06:18]
C
Well, red herring. Red herrings are Atlantic herrings, which is the major subject of, of the encyclopedia, but that have been sort of heavily salted and very heavily smoked, so they become red. I mean, if you look at a kipper, it goes a nice, sort of a nice brownie, a nice brownie shade of sort of heading towards red. But reds actually do turn red just because they've been in the smokehouse, you know, for, for weeks. And the thing about the red herring was that you could keep it in any climate without any looking after it and it would last a year at least. It hasn't really been tested how long, how long you can keep red herring. But, but, yeah, so, so, so basically you're giving the herring a really significant shelf life, much the same as the process where you got salt. Salt herring, which can also. I mean, a barrel of salt herring will last around a year, but a red herring doesn't need to be in a barrel. So, you know, it becomes quite a flexible, it becomes quite a flexible thing. The thing about herring is that it's an oily fish, it smells, or it can smell, particularly if it goes off. But also, I mean, as a, as a, a smoked herring, it has a quite a strong smell. It's why a lot of people sort of unstrangely say they, they don't like kippers to be grilled in the house because they stink, stink it out. I mean, to me it's a beautiful smell. But so, because it, because it was smell, it was two things. I mean, it becomes funny. Anything that smells is funny, just like farts, really. And it also was used to distract dogs, to throw them off the scent in the same way hunt saboteurs will use aniseed these days to throw dogs off the scent. So red herring became a metaphor. I mean, the first person to use it as that metaphor that we've got a record of is a writer called Thomas nash from these 16th century, who wrote a book called Nash's Lenten Stuff, Praise of the Red Herring. And it's got so many distractions and beautiful, odd little journeys here and there. And he was using that as a metaphor. For what he was doing. And then that got picked up, but actually wasn't really picked up until the 19th century that you started to get red herring used as a metaphor. And now, because red herring isn't eaten much in the uk, isn't produced much in the UK although it's still produced for the Caribbean market, still produced for the West African market, and there's a sort of a slightly milder version of it that's still available in that still that's now produced in Egypt and Greece. So because it's sort of fallen out of use in the uk, people just think of it as the metaphor. They don't really think of it as a thing in itself. There are other herrings as well, but the Atlantic herring is the big one, particularly if you include the Pacific herring, which is really an Atlantic herring that just swam over the top of Siberia.
- [10:47]
B
Ah, but yes, okay, that's very helpful to understand that red herrings are real, that there's a reason we may not think that they're real and that Pacific and Atlantic herrings are functionally the sort of same thing. What about sardines? Are they herrings?
- [11:04]
C
Can be, but not in Europe. Ah, they. When people first started doing canned sardines, the French, because you get pilchards off the Bay of Biscay, they were making canned sardines. They call pilchards sardines. And they were making sardines in France and they were making them in Spain. But the Norwegians started making sardines with herring. And in. On the east coast of North America, they started making canned sardines with. With juvenile herring too. It's all using juveniles that. It's all using juveniles because they fit the tin nicely. But the French pursued a litigation, the Great Sardine litigation, between about 1911 and 1915, and across Europe it was agreed that sardines could only be pilchards. But they didn't pursue it in the States or anywhere else in the world. So everywhere else in the world, sardines can be a whole variety of fish, and they kind of can again in Europe, as long as you give the taxonomic binomial of whatever you're using. So in the case of. If you're using herring or sild, as it's often called, bristling for sprats. But herrings, Clupea harangus first. Sprats, Spratus spratus. So if it says that on the tin, you can still call them sardines even in Europe, that's probably too much information for you. I don't know.
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B
No. I love it when, like, the question sounds like it's going to sort of be a scientific answer and then it's actually legal or vice versa. Like, it's always really interesting to think about names. So of course, the other name I have to ask about is in the subtitle of the book, Adventures with the King of Fishes. Why are harang the king of fishes?
- [13:30]
C
Basically, because of their economic importance. It was without question the most important fish from medieval times, just because of the sheer numbers caught that. It's quite an interesting thing in the sense that because you catch herring in such vast numbers or can catch herring in such vast numbers, and because it's an oily fish that will go off, you have to sort out how you're going to preserve it. Salt, smoke, whatever, and you have to develop trade because it's more than you in your community could ever eat. So it becomes quite fundamental to the development of trading in Europe and from Europe. And so that's why it becomes so important. It's financially very important to the fishing communities and to the countries concerned. So, you know, it becomes important. There are also folk tales about why it's the king of fishes, but these probably come out of the fact that it was the king of fishes for economic reasons. But yes, I mean, there's a Thomas Nash himself in Lenten stuff. He. He talks, he tells. He tells a version of the folk story about. About the king of fishes. And essentially the fishes sort of choose not to have sharks as their king because you can't trust them. You want a fish that isn't going to eat you. And also they go around in shoals. So it's like they have an army behind them.
- [15:40]
B
Yeah. Can we talk about those shoals? Because they really help explain the point you just made about the size of the catch one makes. Like, this is not. You catch one at a time on a fishing rod. Like, how big are these shoals?
- [15:54]
C
Well, I'm not sure if they're as big as they once were. They. They have, since the collapse of populations in the 70s, they. They have come back in quite significant numbers and they're not generally thought. Most populations aren't thought to be threatened at the moment. And there are. They calculated that there are around about a trillion Atlantic herrings in the. The North Atlantic area. The shoals have been recorded as, I mean, reasonably regularly, up up to nine miles in length, up to five miles across. No, several fathoms deep. I mean, massive. Massive. Yeah. So it's really intense and it's All. Yes. It's also that there are. There are stories of fishing boats capsizing because of the weight of herring they were trying to pull up in the nets. That's, you know, as recently as the 20th century, there are stories. There are stories like that.
- [17:08]
B
Okay, that's helpful to frame the discussion, I think, because it really gives a sense of the scale that we're talking about here and kind of why it would be such a big part of people's economic life that there'd be laws about it, that it would, as you said, seep into stories and folklore. And so I wonder if we can talk about kind of one type of story, I suppose, harangism. What exactly is this?
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C
Well, the herringism is a. It's an entry in. In the encyclopedia and it's a term that I invented really, because if you like kosher historians for many years ignored herring, probably ignored other fish too, but they, they certainly ignored the kind of just. Just how fascinating and how. How related herrings were to historical shifts, you know, particularly in Europe. And you started to get. In the. Towards the end of the 19th century, you started to get people writing the history as amateurs, really. Enthusiasts. They were herring enthusiasts. And my favorite, the guy called a.m. samuel, who, who was in. He became the. The Secretary to the Treasury. I mean, he was. He was a. A Tory mp, I think, from. From. From. From Norfolk. And he, he wrote a book called the Herring Its Importance in British History. And it's absolutely fascinating in the sense that every, every page virtually opens up another rabbit hole for you to go down. Which is why I suppose I've stayed with the hering for so long, is that it just never stops opening up these rabbit holes. Yeah. So that's. I mean, I. I think that those amateurs and that there are still amateurs like me. I'm. I'm. I'm a herringist. I'm not a. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a kosher historian or. Or whatever. Yeah. That the role of those amateurs has been really important in opening up that history. When I first started working on the. The encyclopedia back in the 90s, they were really the only books you could. You could get. There are now because I suppose because of university funding, you start to get funded because your work is maybe opening up an understanding of European trade and the relationships within Europe between different countries in trading rather than just in warfare. And that probably with the European Union and the funding of academia through that became an interesting way forward. So, yes, basic. Basically, we're now going through a golden age of herring in academic history, in all kinds of zoology and archaeology and women's studies and all sorts of things that people are really beginning to look at that. And that is fascinating and it's turning up huge amounts of new material. But yes, I think the hard yard yards were done in the, in. In the late 19th century, in the early 20th century and haven't been continued.
- [21:19]
B
Yeah, well, I'd love to get into some of those rabbit holes in history if we can. Obviously not as many as are in the book, but I've picked out a few. So I think one thing that comes through in many of the entries in the encyclopedia is, is the importance of the Dutch herring industry. They show up all over the place. So why were they a big deal? And given that so far we've talked more about the British herring industry, when do we get to the point of the Scots or the English being able to sort of take on the Dutch?
- [21:53]
C
It was a really long time. It's. It's comic really. Yes, the British were both in Scotland and, and England really shoddy in their pursuit of the. The herring. But the Dutch, I think it. It's. Well, it starts. There was. There was a major. The first major industrial fishery in. In Europe. Yarmouth was or the mouth of the Yare in East Anglia was always had a herring fair and a fishery. But the first sort of really major industrial herring fishery was in Scania which is the southern tip of Sweden. But at that point in the. In the sort of 12th, 13th century was part of Denmark and the Hanseatic League or the Hans, which was a kind of federation of German Dutch and other national cities moved in on it with the Danes against the Danes with the Danes it was a sort of an uneasy relationship at times. But the Hans had control over salt production in northern Germany, Luna, Bergen et cetera. And they kind of used that control of salt which was absolutely necessary to exploiting the herring fishery to get a hand lot sort of an equal handle on. On that fishery with the, with the Danes. Now the. There were a number of Dutch cities almost from the. From the off in. In that situation that were part of the Hans and they learned just about everything they needed to learn from the practice that evolved in Scania. There were then various struggles between the Hant cities of the Baltic and the Hant cities of the North Sea if you like. And the Dutch disc. The Dutch had always been exploiting the fishery of. Well, the Dutch and the Flemish had always been exploiting the fishery off East Anglia but they discovered a. That there was A series of herring fisheries that they could exploit running from Shetland all the way down to the English Channel, which kind of occurred in sequence going from north to south starting in June and running through until January. And they also exploited ones on the west coast of Scotland and off Ireland. But what that did was where is a herring spawning season, which is the best time to catch the fish because they're at their tastiest locally was really would only be a season of one to two months, two months maximum. But if you've got a sequence running from June through till January, that is big. And they developed factory ships called herring buses and they were salting, they were gutting and salting the herring on board these factory ships. And so they were, they were keeping the fish at their best, in their best possible condition until they got them back to shore. They'd have a two month voyage, go back to, to the home port, unload all the, the herring, then go back out and follow the secrets of, of seasons going down. So they did, they did that. They, they, they really cracked an economic model. I mean the Scania season had only lasted a couple of months, but they had this massive season which they were exploiting and like the, the Scanian fishery, they were really sorted out about quality control. They, they, the things changed over, over the, over the years. But the quality of salt, the, the, the speed of gutting and salting, the speed with which you did it, the promptness with which you did it, the quality of the salt, the quality of the barrels all, yeah, all of these things were thought through in Scania, but then taken even further forward by the Dutch. And they also had a system across Europe where the branding of the barrels meant that somebody unpacking a barrel of salt herring, you know, in Bavaria or Italy, could track it back to who had produced it. So there was a series, there was a scheme of effectively of compensation if anything went wrong. So it was a totally reliable network, trade network overland and by sea. But the English and the Scottish, they weren't really good at quality control. I mean you could maybe, you could maybe draw conclusions about continued attitudes to food in England and Scotland. But they basically, I mean they, they would leave the, the catch for, for, you know, a day or so before they started to, to gut and salt it. They would, you know, they would use poor quality salt. They produced kind of poor quality salt. I mean it was sludge. But also, I mean they, they, well, they sold their herring in Europe but they sold it to the cheap end of the market and they also sold it The Scots in particular sold to the slave plantation provisioners who sailed out of Liverpool and the Shannon and that. I mean, obviously slave plantations, quality didn't matter, you know, so they got away with it. They never got as far as they, they should have done. And there's been a, there was a huge campaign over hundreds of years really to get a Scottish or an English or a British bus fleet like the Dutch had and to adopt these. It's just took a long time. The Scots kind of finally began to crack this in the 18th century, probably. I mean a lot of, A lot of the analysis of this, this history is speculative, but they began to crack it at the same time that the government introduced bounties, sort of subsidy for the, for, for, for the, for the British herring buses that were, were being built. And they tied that to improvements in quality control. And you know, the Scots, the Scots, the Scots had. Mean that they had easier access to, to the key grounds, herring grounds or Shetland. But yeah, it took them a while. The English came along about 50 years after the, after the Scots began to do it. But also, I mean, there had been four Anglo Dutch wars over the 17th and early 18th century. And wars are never good for fishermen and they're never good for, for herring fishing. The Dutch fleet was kept in port too many years, essentially. I mean, the, the Anglo Dutch wars broke, broke the Dutch fishery and the Scots were able to get in selling essentially. It was called the Scotch cure, but it was, it wasn't that much different to the Dutch cure. They were selling it to, to the, well, to, to, to, to, to the markets that, that, that the Dutch had been selling it to.
- [32:07]
B
Yeah, I mean that sort of thing never has just one cause. Right. So it's helpful to understand that it's not kind of on one day. Suddenly everything changes. No, it's building up over time and all of these different things coming together. But the many pieces coming together that I'd actually like to ask you about just told us you've listed a whole bunch of different jobs needed to get from sort of catching a live fish to someone buying it. That's a lot of different jobs, some of which you've mentioned are being done on the boat. But where else are these jobs happening? Who is doing it? Is it just the fishermen themselves doing all of this? Surely not.
- [32:46]
C
Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. We didn't really need a bus fleet because the fish were on, were off the coast of Britain, off the coast of Scotland and England, off the coast of Ireland, etc. Etc. And if as long as you've got fast boats, you can get the catch back to land based curing. So although we did develop the bus fleet, pretty soon we were, the fishermen were getting attracted to a friend, French style luggers which were much faster. They had capacity, they, they could, they could fit all the barrels on, in, you know, in, in, in the holds of, of the, of, of the, the luggers. But more importantly they could sail really fast and get back to land because you weren't that far. The, the Dutch had to have buses because they were quite a long way from the fishing grounds. Whereas the, the, the English and the Scots were closer and, and, and therefore they could manage without that. So that, so they, they actually shifted over to much more of a land based approach to curing which was the traditional one anyway, but, but now with added quality control and they, the Scott, the Scottish cures started bringing their teams of cures down instead of, well, the boats were going down the coast following the different seasons, but the Scottish cures started bringing teams of women and women have always been in land based curing. Even in the Scania fishery it was the women who did the gutting and the salting and the barreling. You know, when there was an Icelandic herring fishery or what they call the herring era, from the sort of turn of the beginning of the 20th century through through to the 1960s and that was, that was women Norway. You know, it was, it was usually the women who did land based curing and the Scottish cures started bringing down the teams of, they were always called lasses. I mean there's a whole discussion of the difference between a fish wife and a fish lass and a herring lass. Essentially the herring lasses who became hugely famous, culturally important were using traditional skills in terms of gutting and salting the fish. But they were just, they weren't selling the fish which they had. Fish wives were traditionally used to sell the fish, carrying it into inland towns, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was just, it was an industrialization of the process. The Scottish cures sort of, I mean there were English cures too, but the Scottish cures became famous for sort of bringing it, bringing these teams of not exclusively Scottish but often, usually significantly Scottish women coming down the coast of Britain over to Ireland, down to Wales even. I mean just doing this. And they were incredibly skillful and incredibly fast. I mean some of the women could gut up to 60 herrings a minute. That's, you know, and it was hard Work your hands were in salt all the, all the time. You had to have a sharp knife, you cut your finger and it was agony and you could, you know, it could get infected and all sorts. You know, I mean it, I mean they used to wrap their fingers with little strips of flour sacks just to protect, protect them. But yeah, then they would come down because by this, by the time this industrial development came or maybe the, the industrial development was enabled by the development of the railways. So you started to get these sort of. The women were coming down using the railways and yeah, they, they would take, follow the, you know, they would leave their villages in the Hebrides or the west of Scotland or Shetland Orkney, northeast Scotland and come, come down through the different herring ports.
- [38:03]
B
Back to what you were saying before about the trading networks developing from all of this.
- [38:07]
C
Yeah, there's, there's, so there's some, there are lovely things. If you go to. There's a Bucky on the, the Moray Firth. There's a, a Bucky and District Fishing Heritage Center, a little museum and they've got the most fabulous collection of tea sets that the women gift tea sets, a present from Great Yarmouth or a present from Lowestoft or whatever in lovely sort of gold paint on the, on the, on the teapot or, or whatever these tea services that came back to Scotland because it was quite important for the women because for the first time they had independent money. I mean in Iceland. I mean they trace the successful rise of feminism in Iceland to the fur. You mean the herring gutting seasons provided the first opportunities for women to have independent or to have yet to have money of their own. And because they were so fast, so skillful at their work, they actually were earning more than the, they were on peace rate. So they were, they were able to earn more than the, the men were on the quayside. And these little things are really important. It was also possible, it was also possible for them to exert industri power in, in Iceland. The, the, the herring girls had their own trade union in, in the UK it was the, I think the General Municipal Boilermakers Union. I mean they, they, I think, I think maybe the TNG also recruited the herring lasses, but because the fish had to be cured, you couldn't afford to leave it on the quayside. So those women would strike for better conditions, never on hours because you just had to cure the fish. But they would strike for, for better. Yeah, for more money per, per barrel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they were very, very effective because the Cures couldn't really afford to leave the herring on the, on the quayside.
- [40:55]
B
Yeah, that's definitely a really interesting aspect of the people involved in this industry. So thank you for telling us a bit about them. And it's really goes back to your point at the beginning of kind of what a big deal this was as a sector and an industry and so something that people are talking about and seeps into culture and practice in all sorts of ways. So I was not surprised to find in the book that you have a bunch of kind of examples of how this became part of popular culture. Poems, songs, sayings, processions. Can you give us some examples of ways that herrings have showed up in these places?
- [41:31]
C
Well, the first herring poem poems were by a Norwegian scald from 9, 960 who had sort of fallen out with. Well, I mean his king had, had been killed and he, he sort of didn't get on with the new lot and he went into exile anyway he needed money being a school without royal patronage. So he went on a. He. He sorted out a herring fishing expedition and wrote a couple of poems about that. There's a massive story in. In English. I, I think it's a massive story in English in English literature. There was a herring joke that appeared that was used by Shakespeare, Ben Johnson and Thomas Nash. Lenten stuff is the kind of conclusion to. To it all. But it was from 18. No, not. Sorry it was from 1596 through till 1599. And it, it, it's. And it, it kind of involves all the sort of the big characters so Robert Cecil and, and the Lord Chamberlain and the warden of the Cinque Ports and Sir Walter Raleigh and all of that. Then it sort of connects to the succession of. The succession of the throne from Elizabeth to James VI of Scotland becoming James I etc. I mean it's far too complicated to, to explain now but I've, I've absolutely loved that and that, that gets a lot of coverage in the, in the, in the book. There's a French. There's a series of French monologues which means red herring from sorrel which was a sort of reddish brown. And there's a whole series of a monologues starting in the 18. So starting with the siege of Paris in 1870 really. And you get it in. It sort of connects to Van Gogh was, was one of the major painters of. Of smoked herring. A little known fact, but he was about five, five paintings of smoked, smoked herring. But anyway, yes, so there's, there's that but it's not just in those cultures. It's. There's a. There's a beautiful, beautiful sort of song, really strange song from Estonia called the Herring Lived on Dry Land, which was.
- [44:36]
B
Please tell us about this one.
- [44:37]
C
Well, it's just. It's a lovely. It's a 19th century song which everybody in Estonia seems to know. But yes, essentially it's. I mean, there was a time when, when herrings were like cats that lived on the land and, and. But they had a taste for salt. And there was one that was in a boat that was carrying salt and he ate his way through the bag of, of the sack of salt, one of the sacks of salt, and didn't notice that he was then eating his way through the side of the. Of the ship which then sank. And as punishment, that's when herrings became fish and they had to live in the salt seas and they would then be barreled in salt. Yes, because before that time the seas.
- [45:35]
B
Themselves were not salty, according to the song at least.
- [45:39]
C
I mean, it's just mad. It was that kind. Well, the kind of madness that you get in in different cultures. The joy of it, really. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely joyful.
- [45:54]
B
Speaking of joyful, you have in the book some examples of processions or celebrations that Haring have featured in.
- [46:00]
C
Yeah, well, there's. There was a. There was a procession in France from about 1300 to the early 15th century, 15, the 1430s, I think, which came at the end of Lent. Because the thing is, people, people got really fed up with herring because fasting sort of in the sort of Roman Catholic tradition involved about 39% of the eating. Weak Lent, which is day after day after day, and most of it was. Most of the fish that you ate was. Was. Was herring because it was cheap and it was readily available. So they were getting really fed up with it. So there's this kind of procession where the curates from the cathedral at Rams would each in procession, trail a herring behind them on a string. The whole point was that you had to step on the. You trot. You were trying to step on the herring of the person in front of you while the person. You had to stop the person from behind you stepping on your herring. It was deemed to be not religious enough and eventually banned. But it was a great thing. But you also got the same thing in Ireland. There's a painting in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork of whipping the herring out of town. And this was not uncommon. They had these sort of, these events, these processions and things at the end of Lent, some have suggested, paid for by butchers who are looking forward to getting a bit of a market back, getting their market share back. But yes, just sort of ritualizing the sort of mocking the herring. That's still, you know, you've still got these, these things, these, these sort of processions and festivals today. There's. There was a, There's a lovely one I went to last November in Faicon in Normandy, where you. And it's a recent thing. It's only, it's only been going a few years, but. But it's kind of like the election of a herring, the herring queen. And the. It's this sort of. It's like pantomime dame, sort of drag event. Fantastic. Really funny. Really, really joyful. So, you know, these, these things. I think it's something of that sort of humor that is attached to herrings has survived. Yeah, clearly.
- [49:15]
B
Yeah, that's a great example of it. People, of course, also still eat herring. It's not just a historical food. So perhaps as a question to wrap up our conversation for listeners who might be skeptical of eating herring, what one or two recipes might you recommend that they try to convert them?
- [49:36]
C
Well, I'd say that it's very hard if you've got fresh herring. It's very hard to beat herrings fried in oatmeal. I mean, you've got the sort of. The sweetness of the flesh and the sort of tasty toastiness of the oatmeal. And if you fry it, if, if you, if you fry it in, in lard or dripping, which you've also fried bacon. That is really, really nice. If you're worried about the bones, just get fillets from your fishmonger and coat them. But, but yeah, coat a whole one and, and, yeah, just gut it and scale it and, and put that in oatmeal. Fry it up. That's just gorgeous. And you can have it. Potatoes on the side with a little jersey potato, bit of butter and bit of lemon juice over the herring. Fantastic. If you've got salt herring. And actually if you go to your local Polish, Eastern European shop, whatever you. They've usually got salt herring for sale there. There's a fantastic dish, a Russian, Ukrainian. There's an origin story for it that sort of suggests that it was. It came. It came from Moscow, but called herring under a fur coat. And it's basically you chop up your, your, you chop up your salt herring and, and you chop up onions and you chop up boiled potatoes, boiled carrots. No. Or grate them or chop or Chop them beetroot, mayonnaise, boiled egg, bit of dill and you spilled it up in layers in a little cake tin and it makes the most spectacular dish. It looks fantastic. And yes, that's herring under a fur coat. That's, that's a, a really lovely one. But I mean, but you've got all the possibilities of, of cooking with, with kippers or bloaters or, you know, all of these, all of these things, they, they all offer fantastic dishes and, and there's a, there's a, there's a really lovely Trinidadian dish. There's a lot of Caribbean red herring dishes. If you can get hold of some red herring, which you can from Caribbean food stores. It's. But basically, basically you stir fry peppers and red herring and Chad on Benny, which is a kind of supercharged coriander. You could use fresh coriander as well. But you, you make a stir fry and you stuff that stir fry in a sort of Caribbean type style dumpling and then you cook that and then serve that on a stir fry. Fantastic. Oh, it's got Scotch bonnet. You use Scotch bonnet which is quite hot but very tasty, fruity. All of these things are good and they're great. I mean just, just, just, just get the fish and, and try them. Yeah, I mean, yeah, and marinating your own. I mean that always tastes better than the shop bought stuff.
- [53:13]
B
Well, it certainly sounds like lots of fun experimenting. So who knows, we might have prompted listeners to go off and try that. And it sounds like you're going to continue to be fascinated with herring going forward, is that right?
- [53:24]
C
Yes, I, I just found, I just found out yesterday. I mean I did, did a lot of stuff in the, Well, I did some stuff in the, in the, in the book about the development of herring reduction plants which are big bugbear because you know, they provide an unlimited market for herring which isn't based on how much, you know, people want or can eat. But they've just started that. These all started with the herring glutz in southern Sweden. The Bohuslan Bohus, long herring gluts which were sort of periodic things and they've just started doing the first archaeological dig in a, of a reduction works and they produced herring oil and, and, and agricultural food and fertilizer. So yeah, that's all. I mean it's the first time anybody's, anybody's actually done an archaeological dig on that. So we shall see. That's going to be very interesting.
- [54:38]
B
Yeah, no, I mean I'm very curious to.
- [54:40]
C
It is to me anyway.
- [54:42]
B
Well, and perhaps for listeners who want to learn more, of course they can go read Rigby's Encyclopedia of the Herring Adventures with the King of Fishes, available in the UK from HIR already in 2025 and soon in the US with Oxford University Press USA. So, Graham, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast to tell us about herring.
- [55:02]
C
Thank you very much.