After smoking, the fish are taken off the speets and selected according to quality. Those which are large and perfect fetch a better price, and command an entirely different market from those which are damaged or broken.
During the smoking of red herrings, the fires are lit each night, and simply allowed to burn themselves out.
Bloaters. There are two kinds of bloaters: those intended for the home trade and those intended for the Mediterranean trade. For the home trade the herring is lightly salted by immersing it in brine for two hours or less. It is then dried in the smoke-house for one night, using billets. Unlike “reds” or kippers, it is not cured by the smoke, but simply dried. The bloaters for the Mediterranean trade are salted in concrete tanks in exactly the same way as red herrings, but, instead of being smoke-cured for 10 days or so, they are simply smoke-dried for two days.
Kippers. Kippering is the only process in the herring industry in which the fish are split before curing. Fresh herrings (sometimes over-day herrings) are bought early in the morning from the drifters and taken to the curing yard. They are split down the back, close to the backbone, and gutted and thrown into large, open baskets. The basket and its contents (about 50 herrings) are then plunged into a tank of running water, and violently agitated to wash blood and slime from the fish. The fish are then thrown into brine in large tanks about 6 ft. by 5 ft. by 4 ft., until the tank is full. Salt is then sprinkled on the surface, and the fish are left from half to one hour, according to their size.
They are then hung on kipper speets. A kipper speet differs from a bloater speet. It is a square bar of wood about 31⁄2 ft. long, and of 1 in. square cross-section. It is supported horizontally. The split herrings are opened out and impaled upon hooks at intervals along each side of the speet. Each speet in this way will carry about eight or nine herrings a side. The speets are then stacked on racks in the “loves” of the smoke-house, are smoked over-night, using fires of oak turnings and sawdust, and are packed the next morning in boxes.
The herring is probably the most abundant food fish known. During the autumn herring fishery of 1920, over 1,000,000 crans of herrings were landed at Yarmouth and Lowestoft. If we assume that one cran measure contains 1,000 herrings, we see that over 1,000,000,000 herrings were caught in less than 4 months, and this probably represents only a small fraction of the number present on the fishing grounds. In 1913, 11,762,748 cwts. of herrings, of value £4,412,838, were landed in Great Britain. In the same year, the exports of herrings from the British Isles were as follows—
| Fresh herrings | 1,464,296 | cwts. | worth | £1,212,493 |
| Cured herrings | 8,797,106 | „ | „ | 5,333,113 |
| Total | 10,261,402 | „ | „ | £6,545,606 |
The quantity of herrings caught by other European countries is as follows—
| cwts. | £ | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| France (1911) | 7,846,503 | 529,739 | ||
| Germany (1913) | Fresh | 148,354 | 75,738 | |
| „ „ | Salted | 1,030,039 | 563,033 | |
| Holland (1911) | 1,685,751 | 919,973 | ||
| Norway (1912) | 4,404,400 | 580,570 | ||
| Denmark (1912) | 845,295 | 140,051 | ||
| Sweden (1912) | 861,420 | 205,555 | ||
| Belgium (1911) | 13,000 | 5,000 | ||
| 16,834,762 | 3,019,659 | |||