Every time I decide to cook my favorite “herring under a fur coat”, I face a dilemma: buy a whole carcass of fish or ready-made pieces of fillet. It seems that I know how to clean herring, and I know how to do it, but I want to save my own time and not bother with choosing seeds. On the other hand, herring fillet is sold in stores in vegetable oil or with the addition of all kinds of seasonings, which cannot but affect the taste of the salad. Therefore (most often) common sense prevails over laziness, and I buy a whole salted herring.
What else, besides fish, is needed for a salad? The ingredients are as follows:
- two medium beets;
- two large carrots;
- five potatoes;
- four chicken eggs;
- mayonnaise.
Vegetables and eggs must be washed, boiled until cooked, cooled, peeled and grated on a fine grater in separate plates.
It's time to fish. How to clean herring? Take a cutting board, covered with cling film or a plastic bag, then with a paper towel. So we will save ourselves from the need to launder boards from fish residues.
We take a herring, open its abdomen - from head to tail - with a sharp knife, pull out the insides. You can leave caviar or milk if they are eaten in your family, or you can throw it away. We remove the guts and a thin black film that covers the herring from the inside. Cut off the head of the fish. Now you need to make a deep incision along the ridge, cutting the dorsal fin. We also remove the fins on the abdomen and near the tail. From the side of the head with a knife, pry the skin and gently pull it to the tail. If you do not make sharp jerks, the skin is easily detached. The fish is cleaned, but the herring is not finished. It remains for us to separate the fillet, which is what we are doing: first on one side, then on the other. Most of the bones will remain on the ridge, but some rib bones will have to be selected manually. Do this carefully: nobody needs a bone in the throat . How to clean herring didn’t you like? Try to attract your other half to this process, because it has long been known that joint cooking brings together.
Cut the fillet into small pieces, begin to collect the salad. We take a flat and, preferably, an oblong salad bowl, where we put all the ingredients in the following order: beets, herring fillets, potatoes, eggs, carrots, beets. We coat each layer, except the lowest, with mayonnaise. When preparing a salad, I do not use salt, enough of that contained in fish and mayonnaise.
Do you know that there is a legend about creating a salad “herring under a fur coat”, according to which “FUR COAT” is an abbreviation? It stands for "chauvinism and decline - a boycott and anathema." The salad was invented in 1918 in the tavern of the Moscow merchant Anastas Bogomilov in order to reconcile representatives of various social strata. The fish symbolized the proletariat, whose favorite food was dishes with herring, beets - revolutionary Red Army soldiers, and vegetables - peasants. The cook, who knew well how to clean herring and how to cook vegetables, decided to combine all the ingredients and flavor them with French mayonnaise. Visitors to the tavern really liked the new dish, which, moreover, was an excellent snack for a drink. They ate more, less drunk, and the number of fights and quarrels decreased accordingly. And they presented the salad just before the New Year, and since then they began to associate the "herring under a fur coat" with this holiday.