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).
Denne historien er fra November 27, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra November 27, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
