Nothing Like a Plate of Smelly Fish to Start the Day
Nothing Like a Plate of Smelly Fish to Start the Day
Kippers in London
I stood, baffled, before the overflowing Full English Breakfast Buffet at my London hotel. It ran the width of the entire wallpapered dining room. I was armed with nothing but a sad little porcelain plate clearly not up to the task. So I took a handful of grapes and scurried back to my seat.
“Would you like a cup of tea, dear?” a friendly waiter asked me. Yes, I said. Tea would be an excellent idea. I needed time to think.
I almost decided to just have cereal when I spotted them in all their strange and smelly glory. They were piled one on top of the other on a large serving platter nearly hidden from view. They were a grey-orangey-brown color with slightly blackened ends. There was a shiny yellow-gold sheen glistening across their tops.
Kippers.
I grabbed my plate and tried not to run back to the table. I maintained ladylike composure. With the silver serving spoon, I nudged the top kipper off the serving platter and onto my plate, careful to make sure the yellowish brown translucent onions came along as well. I gave a sideways glance to my left and to my right. I slid another kipper onto my plate with more onions. The thing is, you don’t see kippers very often, in England or in America. I looked around and took two more.
Kippers took me back to Sunday mornings growing up in central Massachusetts. Kippers, a smoked fish rich in omega oils, were a treat, and my father always made a show of preparing them. My job would be to chop up every onion in the house to fill my grandmother’s gigantic heavy-bottomed skillet. The huge mountain of onions would dissolve into a sweet buttery film covering the bottom of the pan and then the kippers would be placed on top of them. We ate them alongside scrambled eggs with rye bread and butter.
I loved kippers when we had them at home, but I never saw them on any restaurant menu and I have never seen them since. Kippers are a tasty but difficult delicacy. I don’t think there is any way to cook a kipper that will prevent the kitchen and perhaps the entire house from smelling like smoked fish for at least two days. You can soak them, boil them, bake them or omit the onions, but nothing helps. To make things worse, the delicious filets are buried under enough pin bones to assemble a miniature brontosaurus. As a child, my mother always performed delicate surgery to my kippers, deftly sticking the tines of the fork under and over the endless rows of bones, leaving me with tasty, salty, flakey bits to eat with my eggs.
As I prepared to eat my English breakfast kippers, I was delighted to discover that the bones had been pulled away by a dexterous member of the kitchen staff. This was one of the few times I felt absolutely at home while traveling thousands of miles away. That’s pretty good for a small pile of smelly, burnt-orange fish.