A Kipper for Breakfast
You might not know it from this blog, but I love cooking and eating as well as thinking about cooking and eating.
To prove that I am not totally cerebral about food, and to preface a post I am preparing about fish, I’m going to share a treat I give myself a couple of times a year: kippers for breakfast.
A kipper, as you may know, is a herring that has been split, gutted, salted, and smoked. It was long a favorite in the British Isles for breakfast, tea, or supper, and, I understand, after falling out of favor in the late twentieth century, is enjoying a revival.
I wouldn’t try ordering them in Summer when the temperature in Austin, Texas tends to hover around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In November and February, I feel fairly confident that second day delivery in an ice pack is safe.
The kipper is, I think you’ll agree, a very handsome fish when viewed skin side out. 
Flesh side out, well that perhaps a little more menacing.
Half a kipper with a slice or two of my home made bread does me nicely for breakfast, since the flavor of kippers goes quite a long way.
So I snip off the heads and the tails and then snip up the middle of the fish to create four halves. Three go into a ziploc bag to be refrigerated for the coming days.
On the remaining half goes a nice dollop of good butter and a covering of plastic wrap. After a minute and a half on 50% power in the microwave, the butter has melted into the kipper juices and the kipper is heated through. It leaves, wonder of wonder, no smell in the kitchen, and hence no complaints from the family.
Now for the grapple factor, a term that I have borrowed from Fuchsia Dunlop, author of fine books on Chinese cuisine, who learned it from her father. But just as Ginger Rodgers did everything that Fred Astaire did backwards and in high heels, being British, I grapple not with my hands but at one remove with a knife and fork. The knife slides in at a shallow angle just above the tail, allowing me to zip out the backbone and the fine bones attached to it, and fold them over to the left of the plate.
Ah ha, a mouthful of the main tranche of flesh, pale and flaky, then a bite of bread. Three or four mouthfuls later and it’s time to slide the knife under the bones on the other side of the fish and, yes, to resort to the hands to pick out some of the whiskery bones.
Almost done. Close to the skin along the middle of the body runs the best bit of all: a slim stripe of dark, melting, almost black flesh that can be peeled off with the knife. A little scraping of the bones, the construction of a neat pile of bones and skin on the side of the plate, a meticulous sopping up of butter and juices with bread, and its all over.
Except that is, for a final bite of bread with good bitter marmalade as a palate cleanser.
After this, I don’t need to eat until dinner.
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By the way, if you live in the US and like kippers or you want to try them, I get mine from Scottish Gourmet USA, whom I have found very reliable. They source them from John Ross Jnr of Aberdeen. I believe you can also get good Canadian kippers. Skinless boneless ones will do in a pinch though they are never as flavorful. Canned ones, well let’s not go there.
Smoked herring has.been and still is popular meze in Greece sprinkled with olive oil and lemon juice. Most are imported from. UK I think. Traditional food shops used to smell like smoke and you can still find them in small traditional eateries served with ouzo or raki. But never for breakfast! I am not sure if this goes way back in history or is more recent. I remember seeing them in late 60s . Herring g come fm cold north Atlantic water s. Mediterranean herring usually grilled or fried fresh. Interesting bit of food history.
Interesting. A huge amount of UK fish seems to follow the path of hundreds of years, ending up in the Mediterranean. Sounds like a great meze.
My mother would occasionally treat us to kippers. They were always accompanied with sauteed onions. Many a year has passed since I had a good kippered herring.
Saludos,
Don Cuevas
Good to hear from you.Where was this? And, yes, Mexico is a long way from kippered herrings.
Sorry, madam, but, I love a tin of “canned” kippers, because, they’re smoked. And, they’re great on either my homemade or a good commercial rye bread.
To each his own! Enjoy.
Kippertastic! Ireland has a long tradition of kippers, though they slipped out of fashion around the 1980s. Then after the economic crash of 2008-09 there was a major return to cheaper cuts of meat, offal and relatively cheap fish such as mackerel and herring, and that’s when kippers seem to have made a comeback.
I’ve only anecdotal evidence of this, though articles in newspapers such as the Irish Independent and the Guardian both suggest a turning point in Ireland and the UK at around 2011-2012:
http://www.independent.ie/life/smart-consumer/smart-consumer-why-were-all-hooked-on-kippers-the-little-fish-making-a-big-comeback-26857431.html
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/07/food-kippers-smoked-fish-sales-revival
When it comes to cooking kippers the microwave method is great, though they can also be broiled, jugged, steamed, baked in a foil parcel, grilled or even barbecued. And the butter is absolutely essential, and a poached egg wouldn’t go amiss, but you have to start with a good fish.
I avoid frozen kippers, and “boil in the bag” kippers, and anything that has been dyed with a coal tar colourant that gives it a strange radioactive tan. As for canned, I’m definitely in the non-tin camp. The perfect kipper is a totally different (sorry) kettle of fish. It’s made using plump fresh herring, it has to be undyed, and it will have been gently cured in salt and no other additives, then cold-smoked over oak or beech for 18 hours or so.
But one step up from the humble kipper (made from herrings, the “silver darlings” of the sea) is the legendary Arbroath Smokie. These are made from haddock, and I’m not sure if they’re hot-smoked. They are said to have originated in Auchmithie, a small fishing village a few miles north of Arbroath on the Scottish coast, about 40 kilometres south of Aberdeen, though the Auchmithie smokies in turn may well have Scandinavian roots. See http://www.arbroathsmokies.net
Besides having kippers for breakfast, my mum would sometimes turn them into a herring equivalent of mackerel pate: cooked then skinned and boned, they whizz up a treat with butter, lemon juice, fresh parsley and freshly grated nutmeg. Nowadays I’d probably add Philly cream cheese too, and perhaps a hint of horseradish sauce.
Mel, Thanks. Good to meet another enthusiast. I wish, I wish I could get Arbroath smokies here in Texas. Ah well. And the kipper pate sounds lovely.
Hi Rachel,
I haven’t thought about kippers for many years, but I remember them from my childhood. Mum used to buy them at the fish shop in Salisbury on Tuesdays (market day) and she cooked them for breakfast on Wednesdays. We often had fried plaice and chips for lunch at the Cadena Cafe on Tuesdays in the school holidays and probably smoked haddock for supper at home that day! Plenty of fish, but not as much as my father would have liked. He fished on the Nadder flowing through the Coombes farm at Barford and a few other streams, but didn’t catch many!
I really miss the fresh, unfrozen plaice and cod and haddock that my mother used to buy in Fish Row in Salisbury. I was delighted when I went back this summer to find there is still a good fish shop on Fish Row. Plaice and chips was Friday lunch at home for us. The Cadena, which I just looked up for a piece about my grandmother, was a place for the special treat of an afternoon tea of toasted tea cakes slathered with butter served covered dish. We had a mile or so of trout fishing on the Nadder at the bottom of the farm. It was let to the Fishing Club (mainly Salisbury doctors known in the village as the ‘fishin’ gents) and presided over by Mr Wilkins the water keeper who bred trout in the brook, the Tef, that ran through his garden to the river. The young trout were allowed to grow in the Tef that ran through the village before being put into the Nadder. Every so often we were given a couple of trout. My parents said they were muddy?!! I spent hours trying to tickle trout like the poachers I had read about but they must have been a lot more skilled than me.