On Food and Cooking

The smoking of fish may have begun with
fishermen drying their catch over a fire when
sun, wind, and salt were inadequate. Certainly
many familiar smoked fishes come from cool
northern nations: smoked herring from
Germany, Holland, and Britain, cod and
haddock from Britain, sturgeon from Russia,
salmon from Norway, Scotland, and Nova
Scotia (the origin of the “Nova” salmon found
in delicatessens), and smoked skipjack from
Japan. It turned out that smoke imparts a
flavor that can mask stale fishiness, and it
helps preserve both the fish and its own
flavor; the many chemicals generated by
burning wood have both antimicrobial and
antioxidant properties (p. 449). Traditional
smoking treatments were extreme; the
medieval Yarmouth red herring was left
ungutted, saturated with salt and then smoked
for several weeks, leaving it capable of lasting
as long as a year, but also odiferous enough to
become a byword for establishing — or