The joys of moist fish bacon
As with many topics covered by this newsletter, it's better in practice than in theory.
Earlier this year, I started a new job and a colleague gave me some tins as a welcome gift, which was very thoughtful and all the better because they were great tins. One, though, stayed in the pantry until recently because I wasn’t sure what to do with it, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it because, while not inherently horrifying, it was adjacent to one of the horrors of my youth.
I’m speaking, of course, of herring.
The United States in the 1980s, as I often remind my children in an attempt to get them not to take things for granted, was a foreign country. My family moved around a lot, so I lived everywhere from New York to bucolic small towns to the woods, and everywhere supermarkets smelled like stale blood and were filled with things you have to go out of your way to find today, like barrels of pig feet and stacks of tripe. These are the places in which I first encountered and, for reasons I think even enthusiasts will understand, became determined never to consume jars of pickled herring floating in cream sauce. (Tripe I eventually came around on.)
Canned herring is nothing at all like jarred pickled herring, and literally not different at all from the canned sardines I eat all the time. (As this newsletter occasionally points out, in the context of eating fish out of cans, there’s not really such a thing as a sardine; it’s just a marketing term suggesting that it’s a small, oily fish in the Clupeoidei suborder. They’re all very nutritious, at least as far as I know.) Despite knowing this I always passed it over, until I saw a tin of Wildfish smoked herring at Cleo Bagels on Baltimore Avenue. Wildfish is fantastic—I like their smoked octopus and salmon a lot—and knowing that I had the tin of Bar Harbor kippers my colleague had given to me at home to compare it to, I decided to give things a go.
When I got home, I noticed that according to the packaging, I had purchased “smoked” herring; whether this is a matter for The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks or an admission that it wasn’t actually smoked and was instead infused with artificial smoke flavor is unclear to me, but it certainly tastes like it was smoked and the ingredient list features “all-natural wood smoke,” so it probably doesn’t matter. It was great! I mashed it up with an avocado and had it on a sesame bagel and it was the furthest thing possible from what I presume pickled herring in cream sauce to be like, just a smoky umami bomb. What it wasn’t, at least in this application, and likely for reasons laid out above, was particularly distinct from a high-quality can of smoked sardines—maybe the fish was slightly firmer, but I’m probably reaching there.
The Bar Harbor, when I got to it the next day, in fact was distinct. When opened, the can revealed six large, smoky fillets steeping in cracked pepper and their juices, and they resembled nothing so much as pastrami. Here I’ll note that since seeing a poster from an animal-rights group on a lamppost in London this summer—I was accompanied at the time by a doe-eyed vegetarian child—I haven’t been eating meat from land animals. (I’ve been going on such jags for years at a time my whole life and this one may well stick.) I’ll also note that since dark suspicions proved well-founded and a break from dairy in fact cleared up a dermatological problem, I haven’t been eating that, either. Obviously, then, I immediately focused on the possibility of something akin to a bacon, egg, and cheese on a bagel—in previous times, a personal favorite—and found that this herring was absolutely perfect for the application, with avocado standing in for the cheese and the salty smokiness of the fish giving me everything I want out of bacon and nothing that I don’t. My only objection was that I could only finish half.
Since this revelation, smoked herring has more or less displaced sardines in my rotation, something that could be a passing phase or could be the beginnings of a lifestyle change. (I suspect it will stay this way until the weather warms up, and that sardines, which for reasons I find it difficult to articulate feel like a bit more like spring and summer than they do winter, will come back into focus.) It’s every bit as good on toast if I just want a light meal, but also offers other possibilities. For instance, the Bar Harbor fillets can be picked up like strips of bacon and dunked into the yolk of a fried egg—something I suppose you could do with a sardine, but that for reasons of texture as well as flavor and shape just wouldn’t work as well. (I’ll note that there are two varieties of Bar Harbor, the one mentioned here and All Natural Smoked Wild Kippers. The latter, at least in my experience, is excellent but not quite as smoky and comes in larger fillets that don’t make as good an approximation of a pile of strips of bacon.) I’ve also found that King Oscar’s cheap and ubiquitous kipper snacks are, for the purpose, an essentially perfect tin. While they have the same mild shape-related shortcoming that Bar Harbor’s All Natural Smoked Wild Kippers do relative to the Wild Herring Fillets Seasoned with Cracked Pepper, they’re every bit as good and, crucially, come in a somewhat smaller size so that you don’t have to commit to feeling as if you’re eating an entire school of herring when you open a tin. (Both brands also catch their fish in the wild and are certified as sustainable by the MSC, for what you find that worth.)
This has been an exciting voyage of discovery, especially as I have yet to have any bad kippers. (If you’re wondering, while I’m not posing as an expert here, kippering is a method of cooking, so that kippers are just a type of herring that has been kippered. Why they’re called snacks I have no idea.) The worst I’ve had are from widely-available supermarket brand Brunswick, and they were fine, just a bit bland on toast with mustard and sauerkraut. Will the joys of herring lead me to try some that come in a jar swimming in sour cream? Almost assuredly not, though I’ll try to keep an open mind.