This zingy smoked herring salad proved a winner when I was asked to cook for 50 people at a party in Normandy in late August. It was meant to be served on the night of the party as part of a salad buffet to accompany a mechoui — slow-roasted lamb cooked over an open pit. But the 30 or so guests who had arrived by noon had it for lunch, which worked out well as I hadn’t really made enough for 50. Reader, they ate it all and asked for more.
Salade de hareng fumé / Smoked herring salad
The only challenge I faced with this dish was figuring out how much to make for such a large crowd. The recipe is simplicity itself. The fish is chopped and tossed with minced red onion, lemon juice, olive oil and fresh dill. It takes just five minutes to prepare if you’re making it, say, for two people as a light lunch, perhaps accompanied by a mesclun salad, or for up to six as cocktail-hour canapés. But 50? Now that was a brain twister.
As much as I love to cook, and despite my early experience as chef at a small restaurant in Ithaca, New York, it’s rare these days for me to make a meal for more than, say, twelve. The hostess had instructed me to arrive no earlier than noon on Friday, the day before the party. The house would be full of guests, so I’d have to find a way to cook unobtrusively — and very quickly — to get everything ready in time for the festivities on Saturday night,
What would be on the menu? We put our heads together and came up with a selection of easy-to-make dishes that wouldn’t break the bank and that would marry well with the lamb. Many are already on this site: Georgian red bean-walnut salad, spicy Moroccan carrot salad, herbal tomato salad, French potato salad and spicy lentils. We added a pasta gratin and had planned to include roasted eggplant salad as well, but I ran out of time. For dessert I made three huge flaky baklava cakes (recipe coming soon).
Preparation turned out to be less problematic than I had feared. I was able to work undisturbed on the first day as the other guests were off visiting the D-Day beaches. And I had help on the second day in the form of a couple of young guests from Texas who peeled and chopped and stirred and generally amused me with funny stories. By lunchtime on the Saturday we were virtually done.
At this point the man in charge of the mechoui had been at work for a couple of hours. He’d dug a huge pit on the edge of the garden and set up two three-tier arrays of spits loaded with lamb. He lit the fire, and the aroma wafted over the property all afternoon as guests played games and picked flowers to set out on the seven white-clothed tables installed in a giant tent in the yard, and as a musician friend tested out the piano and sound system, which had been installed under the tent the day before.
The original idea for the fish had been to serve it on small squares of black bread for the Saturday evening toast that opened the festivities, accompanied by icy vodka. For yes, one of the guests of honor was the Russian husband of our hostess. (He spends most of his time in France these days and opposes the war.) He had turned 70 this year, and their younger daughter had turned 30, making this a 100-year birthday party.
The smoked herring having already been eaten, we improvised for the toast with smoked salmon on black bread. The dinner proved a success, and afterwards there was music (variations on ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in the style of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Mussorgsky by our incredibly talented musician friend), a raffle (I won a kitschy ceramic biker filled with vodka — not kidding) and dancing into the wee hours. Super fun.
So where does this leave us, cooking-wise? Bottom line: you don’t need 50 people to enjoy smoked herring salad. You can make it for two, or just yourself.
Happy cooking.
