Jan1 wrote:"Herring is the silver darling of the sea
The herring kept children supplied with vital omega-3 oils and Vitamin D
Now is the time of the silver darlings — the final bloom of the herring season. It’s the mark of a good food outlet — restaurant or shop — that they know this and are selling them. The fish are plump with roe and “melt” — the male equivalent — and they are deliciously complex in taste, like a sophisticated mackerel."
Words above from here
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/herring-is-the-silver-darling-of-the-sea-wmkdrr5g3qhWords below from here
boroughmarket.org.uk/articles/silver-darlings
"They used to be all we ate. They were the most popular protein for millions and millions of people in these isles, plucked from the icy waters, smoked, salted, devoured, providing life-giving sustenance to the poor and an entire industry to hundreds of villages and ports on the south-west coast of England and the east coast of Scotland.
Take tiny Clovelly, for example: fisherman have trawled the seas here for at least a thousand years and at the height of the herring trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were 100 boats based at the north Devon port, fishing for those beautiful silver darlings. In 1814, 3.6 million herring were landed, with every man in the village employed in the trade until just over a hundred years ago.
I love the poetry and the history but it’s the taste that really makes me want to shake you by the lapels and make you eat more herring. No, it’s not ‘too fishy’ or ‘too bony’ or whatever reason it was that made us as a nation fill our boots with fishfingers and forget our silver darlings. Try writing poetry about a fishfinger.
More to the point, try eating one and then some of my fresh Sussex herrings, caught on a day boat yesterday, filleted by me today and fried in butter and bacon fat with a golden crust of oats. Try them and tell me that we, in our neglect of herrings haven’t committed an act of culinary, cultural and historical vandalism of which we should all be a little bit ashamed."
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Now, if you should be near Clovelly this November it's the … Clovelly Herring Festival on November 18, 2018
Clovelly Herring Festival always falls in November. It’s the time of year when our historic village celebrates the coming of the great “Silver Darlings” better known as Herring. We celebrate and promote this tasty, nutritious fish whilst supporting sustainable fishing.
The village always depended on the harvest of herring. Caught in superb condition for a short season off this coast. Hence records go back over 400 years and in 1749. Then there were about a hundred herring boats in the port. When fishing was good, 9000 herring could be landed at one time. Those days of massive catches are long gone. These days we have just two herring fishermen, both employing sustainable fishing methods using only drift nets and long lines.
https://www.clovelly.co.uk/events/clovelly-herring-festival/I find all this quite fascinating - so thank you Chris for mentioning Silver Darlings
All the best Jan