Loch Fyne Kippers: Herring, Smoke and the Silver Darlings

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The reputation of Loch Fyne herring is well documented. The invention of the kipper is often credited to a single Northumbrian curer, but this simplifies a longer history of smoking fish. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) is used below for the history of herring cures and smoking; its account of where the name "kipper" came from is offered as a probability, and is labelled accordingly.

The kipper

established To make a kipper, a whole herring is split down the back from head to tail, gutted, opened flat, soaked in brine and hung over smouldering wood chips, traditionally oak, to cold-smoke for several hours. The result is a rich, oily, smoky fish, usually grilled or poached and eaten at breakfast.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), gives the traditional method in a few lines: the fresh herring were split, cleaned, thrown into vats with plenty of salt for a few minutes, spread on tenterhooks or racks and smoked for about eight hours. She adds her own memory of a fishing port on Lochfyneside, where the boats came in at dawn and the catch was run straight up to the kippering sheds, plunged into brine and hung over smouldering oak chips while its colour changed "from silver to burnished copper". The kippers were eaten the next morning with buttered baps, oatcakes and tea. When she sent a box of the lightly smoked "white" kippers to a friend in London, the reply was that gold would not buy such fish there.

established McNeill notes that kippering of herring was carried on mainly on the west coast, where the "wastlin'" (west-coast) herring were the pick of the market, while the east coast specialised in curing haddock and other white fish.

established Regional kippers. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) defines the kipper as a herring split open, lightly salted, sometimes dyed and cold-smoked, and says the best are still made by small-scale curers in Scotland, the Isle of Man and a few English places such as Craster in Northumberland. It distinguishes several cures. The Craster or Newcastle cure came first. The Manx kipper is undyed. The Scottish kipper is often dyed and quite salty. The Whitby kipper is lightly salted but strongly smoked. Large-scale producers generally use an artificial dye, which the Companion calls permitted but undesirable.

shared Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), judged that the best kippers came from Tarbert on Loch Fyne, and that a good kipper should be "a subtle silvery-brown, rather than red", red being a sign of dye. Her best way of cooking it was under a fairly strong grill until the backbone begins to lift. Kipper pâté, she notes, was a popular twentieth-century dish. Her ranking of Tarbert is a taste judgement. Her description of the kipper as hot-smoked is a slip: the kipper is cold-smoked, as the Companion and the curers' own methods show.

established The kipper became a fixture of the Scottish travelling breakfast. Hope recalls the dining-car breakfast on the West Highland Line from Glasgow to Mallaig in the 1950s, served as the train ran from Ardlui to Rannoch Moor: porridge and cream, Loch Fyne kippers, eggs, oatcakes, toast, marmalade and honey.

established Fat and season. The Companion explains why local cures differed. The herring fishery used to move round the British Isles clockwise through the year, and the fish varied in fat depending on the season and the ground. Each curer's recipe was tuned to the local fish. With the decline of stocks and the change in fishing patterns, most curers now buy herring from much further afield than when those recipes were developed. This is the same story as at Loch Fyne, where the smokehouses outlived the local fishery.

Smoke and the herring

established The Companion's entry on smoking explains what the smoke does. Wood smoke deposits tarry substances that kill bacteria and seal the surface, which keeps fat from going rancid; that is why smoking suits oily fish such as herring. On its own, smoking is a weak preservative, and it was always combined with salting or drying. In medieval Europe smoked herring was as important to the poor as dried white fish, and an English document of 1349 already mentions smokehouses built for herring. A smokehouse was a tall, narrow building with beams across it, the fish hung on sticks between them and the smoke escaping through loose roof tiles; oak was the preferred fuel. Such buildings changed little until the first continuous kiln, carrying fish through on chains, was patented in 1883.

established Smoking at home was common in Scotland. The Companion records that fishermen's wives smoked their own fish in the chimney, a practice very common in Scotland until the mid-nineteenth century, made easy by peat fires. This matches the chimney cures McNeill records for haddock at Auchmithie and Findon.

established Cold and hot. A kipper is cold-smoked, at temperatures that do not normally rise above about 29°C (85°F), so the fish is flavoured but not cooked. The Hanseatic ports of northern Europe developed hot-smoking, in which the fish is partly or wholly cooked; hot-smoked herring are Bücklinge, anglicised as "buckling". Hot-smoking adds flavour but does not lengthen keeping time.

Woodger and the invention

shared John Woodger, a fish curer in Seahouses, Northumberland, is often credited with inventing the kipper around 1843. In fact, herring had been smoked and salted for centuries in various forms, such as red herring and bloaters. Woodger's cold-smoked split herring became the standard kipper.

established The Wordsworths' journal helps confirm that the kipper was new in the 1840s. At the inn at Tarbet, by Loch Lomond, in 1803 they were troubled by the smell of herrings hung to dry over the kitchen fire. Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), points out that these cannot have been kippers, which came some forty years later; they were the older household smoke-dried herring. She adds that the Scots adopted Woodger's idea so quickly that few people now realise it came from England.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) gives the fullest account. In 1843 or shortly before, a Northumbrian curer, John Woodger, after years of experiment, launched a split, gutted, lightly salted herring smoked overnight, which he called the "Newcastle kipper" and sold on the London market. Within a few decades these kippers had almost completely displaced the old salty red herring. The same move towards lighter cures, the Companion notes, produced the Finnan haddie in Scotland. Railways and, later, refrigeration made heavy preservation unnecessary, which supports McNeill's view that fast transport created the milder smoked fish.

established Red herring and bloater. The red herring was soaked in brine with saltpetre, dried and then smoked heavily for several days. It dates back at least to the thirteenth century. Its name, the Companion explains, is folk etymology: the Anglo-Norman harenc sor (modern French hareng saur) meant cured herring, but sor could also mean red. The bloater, by contrast, is a whole herring lightly salted and only briefly smoked, so that it stays silver; a new lightly cured bloater was first made at Great Yarmouth around 1835. Its name may come from a Scandinavian word, or simply from the plump, "bloated" look of the fish.

established In Scotland, McNeill notes, the heavily salted and heavily smoked red herring was long the staple of the poor, and not always a welcome one: the sixteenth-century poet Alexander Montgomerie complained of a life lived "on raw reid herring reisted in the reek". The red herring was smoked whole; the kipper is split before curing. McNeill credits the move to milder, lightly smoked fish to fast railway transport, which made heavy preservation unnecessary.

established The word "kipper" was used of salmon before herring. McNeill notes that kippered salmon appears in the household book of James V (reigned 1513–42), and in the Highlands kippered salmon was a winter staple long after. The transfer of the name to split smoked herring came later.

shared The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) takes the word back further, to references to "kippered salmon" from as early as the fifteenth century. It warns that these are hard to interpret, because a "kipper" was also a spent salmon, a fish that had spawned and survived in thin, poor condition. Following C. L. Cutting's Fish Saving (1955), it suggests that such fish were made saleable by curing, and that the cure took its name from them. Woodger then borrowed the salmon term for his herring. The chain is plausible, but the early evidence is thin.

established Older methods survived in the islands. McNeill quotes Martin Martin's Description of the Western Islands (1703): herring caught after 10 September could be kept for eight months without salt, simply gutted, tied in pairs by the neck with a rush and hung on a rope of heather across the house.

Loch Fyne herring

established Loch Fyne, a long sea loch in Argyll, was famous for large, fat herring, said to be among the best in Scotland. Fishing villages such as Tarbert and Inveraray depended on them, and ring-net fishing developed in the loch in the nineteenth century.

shared The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), explains why Loch Fyne mattered so early. In the eighteenth century it was the most productive herring loch on the whole west coast, and the fish only rarely failed. Glasgow and its neighbouring towns gave it a market on the doorstep, and herring also went south to Manchester and London. Hope judges that the Clyde fishermen were probably the most prosperous in eighteenth-century Scotland, because they had both fish and buyers close at hand. That is her reading of the economic histories, not a measured comparison.

shared Hope also recommends John MacDougall Hay's novel Gillespie (1914), set in the 1860s in "Brieston", which she identifies as Tarbert, as an accurate picture of the loch's fishery. In the novel the drift-net is giving way to the ring-net, then called "trawling" and still illegal, with a Fishery Cruiser patrolling the loch. On a day of a big catch the smacks bound for Glasgow refuse to buy, and the boats offer their herring at five shillings a box, then four, three, two and one, with whole skiff-loads otherwise thrown back into the harbour. The scene is fiction, though Hope calls the novel's picture of the trade astonishingly accurate.

shared The herring were nicknamed "Glasgow magistrates". The usual explanation is that they were as plump as the city's well-fed bailies. McNeill gives a different one: entries in Glasgow's council accounts show that barrels of herring were often presented by the city to those who had done it favours or services, and she attributes the nickname to this practice of the magistrates. She adds that the Grand Antiquity Society of Glasgow kept the joke alive by inviting guests to its annual dinner for "supper and the meeting of the magistrates", with herring in the place of honour. Both explanations may have fed the joke; neither is proven.

shared The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) adds a third strand. It quotes A. M. Samuel's The Herring (1918), who says the red herring sold in the south of Scotland was sometimes called a "Glasgow magistrate", just as the Yarmouth red herring was nicknamed a "militiaman" after the soldiers' red coats. On that reading the joke was about colour as much as plumpness, and it attached to the cured fish rather than the fresh Loch Fyne herring. The three accounts are not exclusive, and none can be shown to be the original.

established McNeill also records the Edinburgh street cry "Wastlin' herrin'!", and notes that a keg of Loch Fyne herring was a popular gift in Edinburgh and the east. In Susan Ferrier's novel Marriage (1818), which she quotes, the gourmand Dr Redgill praises the Lochfyne herring as fat and luscious, "melting away like butter in your mouth".

established Visitors found the same. Dorothy Wordsworth, touring with her brother William, wrote on 30 August 1803 that at Cairndow, near the head of Loch Fyne, they "ate a herring fresh from the water, at our landlord's earnest recommendation – much superior to the herrings we get in the north of England", as quoted by Annette Hope. Meg Dods (1826) gave "Fried Herrings as dressed at Inveraray, and the Highland Sea Lochs": the fish "obtained in these localities almost alive" were split, peppered, laid two together with the backs outwards, dipped in toasted oatmeal and fried for seven minutes. In summer, she added, they were served at breakfast on the Clyde steamers and round the north, east and west coasts. Fresh fried herring, not the kipper, was the original Loch Fyne breakfast.

Decline

established In the twentieth century, overfishing and changes in herring stocks led to the collapse of Loch Fyne's herring fishery, as in much of the North Sea. Today, smokehouses around the loch continue to make kippers, but they may use herring caught elsewhere.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) notes that herring shoals have always been hard to predict, and that natural swings have been made worse by overfishing: the North Sea stock fell by half between the 1950s and the 1960s. Restrictions agreed by governments are hard to judge because of the species' natural unpredictability.

The herring

established The Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus, is, in the Companion's judgement, probably the fish that has had most influence on the economic and political history of Europe. It ranges across the North Atlantic, south to northern France on the European side and Chesapeake Bay on the American. It swims in huge shoals, and distinct races differ in size and fat: the Baltic herring is smaller and leaner than the Atlantic. Adults commonly reach 20 to 25 centimetres, with a maximum of about 40.

established Herring are oily but can be fried. The Companion's advice for doing so is the Scottish one: coat them in oatmeal first, and serve them with boiled, not fried, potatoes. Grilling and baking suit them; poaching and steaming do not.

established Relatives abroad. The Companion surveys the many other herring cures of northern Europe: German buckling, hot-smoked; rollmops, rolled fillets kept in vinegar; Bismarck herring, marinated with onion; Danish sweet-pickled herring; Swedish surströmming, fermented and notorious for its smell; and Dutch nieuwe haring, the first herring of the season, eaten raw. It also records that a French official publication of the 1990s briefly implied that a northern French product was the original kipper, a suggestion dropped from the next printing.

The silver darlings

established Herring, known as the "silver darlings", were the basis of a huge Scottish industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employing fishermen and the "herring girls" who gutted and packed the catch. Neil Gunn's novel The Silver Darlings (1941) captured the era.

• Loch Fyne herring were nicknamed "Glasgow magistrates".
• Kippers are cold-smoked, so they are cooked before eating.
• The modern kipper is often credited to a Northumberland curer.
• Herring were called "silver darlings".
• Neil Gunn wrote a novel called The Silver Darlings.
• Glasgow once presented barrels of herring as civic gifts, which may explain the "Glasgow magistrates" nickname.
• "Kippered" was used of salmon before it was used of herring.
• Edinburgh street sellers once cried "Wastlin' herrin'!" for herring from the west coast.
• Woodger first sold his kippers in London as "Newcastle kippers".
• A "kipper" was once a spent salmon that had survived spawning.
• The "red" in red herring comes from a misunderstanding of the Anglo-Norman sor, meaning cured.
• Until the mid-nineteenth century many Scottish fishermen's wives smoked fish in their own chimneys over peat.
• The North Sea herring stock halved between the 1950s and the 1960s.
• In 1803 Dorothy Wordsworth found Loch Fyne herring "much superior" to those of the north of England.
• Meg Dods's Inveraray herrings were fried two together, backs outwards, in toasted oatmeal.

• Myth: Kippers were invented at Loch Fyne. The modern cold-smoked kipper is often credited to John Woodger of Seahouses, Northumberland, around 1843, though herring had been smoked and salted for centuries as red herring and bloaters. The Scots adopted the idea so quickly that few now realise it came from England.
• Myth: Loch Fyne kippers are made from Loch Fyne herring. The loch's herring fishery collapsed in the twentieth century. Smokehouses around the loch still make kippers, but the herring may come from elsewhere.
• Disputed: Why the herring were called "Glasgow magistrates". The usual explanation is their plumpness, McNeill attributes it to Glasgow's custom of presenting barrels of herring as gifts, and A. M. Samuel says the name was given to red herring sold in the south of Scotland. None can be shown to be the original.
• Disputed: Where the word "kipper" comes from. It was used of salmon before herring, and the Companion suggests it came from "kipper", a spent salmon whose poor flesh was made saleable by curing. The chain is plausible, but the early evidence is thin.
• Myth: All Scottish kippers are undyed. The Scottish cure is often dyed and quite salty. The Manx kipper is the classic undyed one.
• Myth: Kippers are hot-smoked. Annette Hope describes them so, but the kipper is cold-smoked, so the fish is flavoured but not cooked.
• Myth: The herrings drying at the Tarbet inn in 1803 were kippers. The kipper came about forty years later. They were the older household smoke-dried herring.