SAUCY KIPPERS a
SIR,—It was good to see Leslie Adrian making rude faces at dyed kippers. Let me curdle his blood by informing him that sometimes it is not even fresh but frozen fish that is dried, dyed, and steeped in
chemicals in order to pass as a kipper. He will have noticed that some hotels' breakfast kippers are drier and more tasteless even than the others: these are - they. English hotels affect a snobbish contempt for bloaters: their real objection is that they cannot be kept indefinitely and, even more than kippers, ought to be freshly cooked. But they are worth buying at the fishmonger's when opportunity offers: the flavour is more delicious than a kipper's, and there is less scope in the curing for jiggery-freezery-fakery-pokery.
Mr. Adrian will be pleased to know that properly cured haddock are not so rare as he thinks—certainly not in London. They told me at Grimsby docks that the best haddock for smoking are always bought by a number of such London firms as he describes, in just such districts (I buy my own from a family of haddock-smokers in Essex Road, just past the Angel).
What I also learned at Grimsby, over breakfast at the docks, was this: to retain and enjoy the smoky flavour of haddock—it was put there to be enjoyed, not to preserve the fish—do not poach it in milk, in which much of the flavour floats away, but saute it in butter (plenty of butter, lest it dry) very lightly in a frying pan. Delicious!—Yours faithfully,
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