repeating this three or four times, according to your taste. Any of the others may be used singly or in combination. The backbone must be well saturated. Stow away, wrapped in paper, in malt cooms and charcoal; they will keep a long time, and repay your trouble well.
CAPE BRETON, OR DIGBY HERRINGS.
St. John’s, N.B., and Cape Breton furnish us with these highly flavoured fish, smoked with the pine branches of that region. Small herrings visit our coasts soon after Christmas, and being “shot,” or without roes, are not much esteemed, but will serve well for curing in this way. Let them lie in a saturated solution of common salt so long as just to taste of the brine, then put them on spits, dry them a week, and smoke them for a month with deal chips, having much turpentine in them, from carpenters’ shops, and with the fruit of the larch fir tree, fir cones, and top branches of any of our firs, and some oak sawdust to smother the flame. These fish are generally eaten without being cooked, and will keep a long time, packed in small boxes, or buried in malt cooms, &c. &c.
ABERDEEN REDS.
For this purpose the herrings should be large, full-roed, and fresh. Immerse them in a pickle of twenty-nine pounds of common salt to seventy-one pounds of water, and to every pound of salt add half an ounce of saltpetre. When they become rigid and moderately flavoured, run off the pickle, put them on the spits, dry them a day or two, and smoke them with
| Oak lops | 2 | parts |
| Fern | 2 | parts |
| Sawdust | 2 | parts |
until they are of a deep red.
SPELDINGS.
At present we are not aware of any superior method of curing the haddock to the “finnin haddock,” which, if procured soon after they are drawn from the smoke, are very fine eating. But some seasons produce these fish in such abundance that it induces curers to save them by various processes; the small ones may be converted as follow: Split them open at the belly, right over the backbone, clean away all the garbage, gills, &c, and lay them in a strong brine of common salt until nicely flavoured, then hang them on your tenters, dry them a day or two, taking care they do not become clammy, as these fish very soon are spoiled. Make a fire in your chimney with oak lops, sawdust, and beech chips, and when you have brought it to embers put in the rods, and first dry and then smoke them highly. Whitings are often done the same way, when the markets are glutted with the fresh fish.
SMOKED SPRATS.