CHRISTOPHER PINCHER
celebrates the return of warm summer nights with a taste of Provence and the finest — rosé in the world
Hamburg. Caesar Salad may be named after César Ritz or Cesare Cardini, who had a prohibition-busting restaurant in Tijuana in the Twenties, or neither. Will you get less enjoyment from chicken Marengo if you think it is named after the homonymous city in Iowa, rather than Napoleon’s horse? Both attributions are false.
On the other hand, you may like mayonnaise more if you know about the siege of Mahón. Might aleatory knowledge improve your sandwich? Or could breakfast benefit from acquaintance with Lemuel Benedict, who combined poached eggs and vinegar in a hangover-remedy at the Waldorf in 1894?
Is Peach Melba mellifluous because it evokes a diva? Does oil history lubricate your Oysters Rockefeller or Waterloo make your Wellington taste less like a boot?
I’m disinclined to eat Hershey Bars or margarine, but their links with American wars and French imperialism might titillate some palates: Hershey perfected the cloying consistency to make his chocolate melt-proof in tropical ration-kits; margarine appeared in response to Napoleon III’s competition for a cheap fat-product for his navy during the great global lipids-shortage of the mid-nineteenth century.
HEINE’S FIRST ENGLISH translator, Francis Storr (who was better at classical Greek than German) doubted the accuracy of the poet’s information about his herring, suggesting that it got its name from a corruption of Bock
— German for a comparably stinking billy-goat. The amateur etymologists were wrong. Heine’s Bücking, like “buckling” in English, was named for the probably legendary Willem Beuckel, whom Dutch lore credited with the smoking and salting process that was the foundation of
Zeeland’s first great international commerce in the late middle ages. Past generations knew the difference between a buckling and a bloater (herrings, respectively, smoked whole and gutted first). Arthur Askey favoured the latter:
I love a bloater for my tea, And if no bloater do I see — Ah! That is such a blow t’me.
Both kinds, like kippers, make good pâté, and grill well.
In some ways Beuckel’s was a deplorable invention because — after half a millennium of consequences — pickling, salting, kippering, canning and bottling have almost driven fresh herrings out of the market.
In May, however, the North Sea variety grows plump and succulent. If I can get them “caller, bonnie and halesome”, I depart from my usual Spanish repertoire to cook them Scottish-fashion, in oatmeal, for northerners know herring best: buckling, bloater, or Bismarck, the grandest herrings are boreal.
OFFICIOUS RECIPE-WRITERS may urge marinading fresh fillets in fussy tinctures, or coating them in milk; but a mix of coarsely and finely ground oatmeal should stick to the fish unaided, with a bit of pressure from strong fingers, before frying gently in a little butter. The oats add crunch and absorb fat.
“Caller herrin’s no got lightlie,” as Carolina Oliphant, Heine’s contemporary, sang, but is worth fishers’ and shoppers’ efforts. Pleasure in the dish may grow if you associate it with Oliphant’s role in perpetuating romantic Jacobitism in nineteenthcentury Britain, or with elite poetesses’ passion for aping popular song.
Or, in search of remoter connotations, you could dream back to Beuckel and the origins of the Dutch Golden Age, or even to the role of the herring in guiding medieval Norse migrations and viking raids. And, unlike Heine, you would probably be right.