An ode to the humble herring

Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes, Graeme Rigby, Hurst, £25

Not many encyclopedias have a hero. This one does: the Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus, which makes the longest migrations of all its brethren, touching on many histories, many shores. To some it is ‘king of the fishes’. But it has other names, too. For many, herring are silver darlings, their scales giving iridescent lustre to blue-green backs and white bellies. Joris-Karl Huysmans saw Rembrandt’s art in their shimmer. Smoked and salted they provisioned long voyages, where they were known as Yarmouth capons, Billingsgate pheasants, or Digby chicks, depending on their port of origin – Digby being one such in Nova Scotia.

Before echo-sounding, fishermen located them by banging the anchor or rattling the chains against the side of the boat and looking for the shoal’s reaction, a great burst of phosphorescence that in Scotland they called ‘fire in the water’. Then there is what the Dutch call ‘herring lightning’, when, according to Alexandre Dumas in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873), ‘shoals several leagues in length and breadth [are] so thick in the shallows they stifle each other in their thousands’.

The herring has long been an avatar of the sea’s abundance, a quality it shares with Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring, Graeme Rigby’s glorious labour of love. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing around the turn of the 13th century, recorded times in the Sound, the strait between Denmark and Sweden, when there were so many herrings that ‘ships can hardly use their rudders and one can catch them with the hand alone’. Throughout history, fishing boats could be lost, capsized under the weight of their catch. It happened as recently as 1920 to the Mary Ann, sailing out of Penzance.

Even when abundant, the herring has deep associations with dearth as the food of choice for Lent in medieval northern Europe. Herrings – part food, part symbol – played ritual escort to the season. When John Gladman was crowned Norwich’s King of Christmas in 1443, an effigy of Lent was borne before him dressed in red and white herring skins; in Reims, the end of Lent was marked by the Procession of the Herrings, when each cathedral canon dragged behind him a herring on a string, attempting to tread on the fish of the man in front while keeping his own untrodden. The Reformation may have made herrings repugnant to the right-thinking sort, but they are nothing if not an ecumenical fish: by the 16th century, England was exporting red herrings to the Ottoman Empire.

The ebb and flow of the herring trade moves through the pages here, as a darting, surging silver-backed mirror to history. Charlemagne, it has been said, founded Hamburg as a herring port in 809. The Hanse dominated the Baltic herring trade from Lübeck, not far to the east, founded three centuries later. It helped that they controlled the supply of salt for curing. By 1375, the Holy Roman Emperor was calling the city one of the five glories of his dominions, notably the only one not in Italy. ‘The herring is one of those products’, wrote the Comte de Lacépède in his Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (1798), ‘the use of which decides the destiny of empires.’

Science tells us that herring populations adapt to changing water temperatures: they like it cold. But to the fisherman amid their empty nets, it looked like caprice. Were herring not easily offended by spilt blood or bad behaviour, for example? Or was it possible that herrings conveyed a message about God’s favour in times of both abundance and dearth? ‘These herrings’, wrote the antiquarian William Camden in 1607, ‘which in the former age swarmed only about Norway, now in our time, by the bounty of divine providence, swim in great shoals towards our coasts.’

Other sources tell us that God made his wishes quite explicit in this instance: in November 1587, it was said, he sent two herrings, marked with either Gothic print or Hebrew, to be caught off the Norwegian coast. They were rushed to Frederick II, king of both Norway and Denmark, at his court in Copenhagen. Deciphering God’s words proved tricky, but within months Frederick was dead and the herring catch continued to decline.

Herring populations have collapsed – or moved their grounds – more than once. At its peak, the herring accounted for between 40 and 50 per cent of Iceland’s exports. In 1969 they disappeared. Quaysides and processing plants were abandoned. Britain banned all herring fishing for six years around the turn of the 1980s. The Norwegians have a name for the phenomenon of herringless waters. They call it a ‘black sea’. Let’s not go overboard on such worries though: there are still estimated to be a trillion darlings somewhere in the oceans of the world.

Rigby’s Encyclopaedia is a quixotic affair, emerging from 25 years of ‘improvisations with chance and memory’. But how else to categorise the quiddities of a herring shoal? Not for nothing is Thomas Nashe’s extraordinary Lenten Stuffe (1599), an encomium to the red herring, a touchstone. Like Nashe, Rigby’s attention has a quicksilver quality which nonetheless leaves the reader satisfyingly replete.

Recipes are scattered throughout; there are eight from Alexandre Dumas alone. I think herring tossed in oatmeal and fried in dripping, which Rigby traces back to the Romans in Britain, appealed to me most; the author’s favourite is probably ‘Herring Pasties’. Some dishes sound more challenging. Champorado is one: the favoured breakfast dish of the Philippines, it is made of sticky rice, chocolate and evaporated milk with crisply fried and dried salted herring crumbled on top. Then there is Surströmming, fermented Baltic herring from the Gulf of Bothnia. Two hundred barrels of it were once opened together on the island of Ulvön; the stench made birds drop dead from the sky. ‘Some twenty-first century cultures have lost a tolerance for strong smelling foods,’ Rigby notes.

For all the exuberance with which Rigby splashes around in this beautiful information – his phrase – there is a recurrent elegiac note. ‘Sales of red herrin’ and kippers and bloaters have all dropped down over the years’, says Will Buckenham of The Old Smokehouse in Lowestoft, founded in 1760 and the oldest working smokery in Britain. ‘There’s too many… convenience foods and people just don’t want the inconvenience of having to cook.’

Should we mourn lost hardships? I’m not sure. Rigby has found herring among some musical giants – Benjamin Britten, Rogers and Hammerstein, Biggie Smalls – but it is the songs of the herring lasses that lingers in the mind. The women themselves were Scottish and they emerged from the 19th-century British industrialisation of herring production. They moved from port to port down the east coast, beginning in the Shetlands in May, reaching Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft in November. From there they often moved down into the Channel where the season ran into January. It was brutal work. Rigby cites the example of Annie Watt, originally from Peterhead, who remembered one week in Gorleston, on the Norfolk coast, before the First World War. Her team gutted and packed 288 barrels in four days. Rigby does the maths: that’s 150,000 herring per woman, 37,500 a shift. ‘We sang a lot at work’, another herring lass recalled. ‘I sometimes think we sang to stop ourselves crying.’

Like any encyclopaedia, Rigby’s looks back, throwing its net wide, sweeping up all manner of history, nomenclature, science and side-glances into something that sharpens the appetite on almost every page. It smarts with life. Who knows what tomorrow holds for the herrings and the fleets that chase them, but what a path the silver darlings have made through the past, exploding in bursts of hunger and contentment, mystery and meaning, dearth and light, all caught here with obsessive, piquant affection. And, as Rigby says of his own, never-recovered childhood taste of pickled Norwegian herring, ‘there’s no competing with memory’.