MAX BERGIUS is holding a pair of kippers aloft. ‘Here they are, the quintessentially British breakfast,’ he beams, brandishing them triumphantly like the spoils of war. It’s early on a Wednesday morning and we’re under a railway arch in east London—home to Secret Smokehouse, which he founded in 2016. Alongside the sides of salmon being carefully pin-boned by his team are sleek and silvery herrings fresh out of the water. ‘We take big, beautiful, chunky ones, remove the guts and gills, hand-split and fillet them and then smoke them over oak sawdust,’ Mr Bergius explains. According to him, they have ‘a lovely, delicate flavour’— which might come as news to anyone who came of age pushing them around their plate.
For much of the 20th century, smoked herrings were a superior way to start the day: inexpensive, plentiful and nutritious. ‘It was with a merry cry that I greeted Jeeves as he brought in the coffee and kippers,’ says Bertie Wooster in 1946’s Joy in the Morning, speaking for the tens of thousands of Britons who breakfasted on fish landed off the Isle of Man, Northumbria (the ‘kippering’ process was formalised here in 1843), Scotland’s west coast or North Yorkshire. They always evoked strong feelings: in the early 1970s, Laurence Olivier was apoplectic when the Brighton Belle that ran between London and the coast threatened to stop serving them in its dining car (the kippers stayed, but the train was decommissioned in 1972; there’s a moral in there somewhere).
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