‘I don’t mind the smell in the house, but my wife does,” says George West. He claims not to mind the bones, either. “It takes me back in time. Kippers are part of our British tradition.” A fifth-generation fisher, West cooks his kippers on the barbecue at home in the small village of Gardenstown on the Aberdeenshire coast, serving them up with new potatoes and a little butter.
The 65-year-old first went to sea at 16, and remembers eating freshly caught herring onboard his family’s vessel, Courage. But in 1977, just three years into his fishing career, herring populations crashed and the industry shut down almost overnight. “It was a worrying time,” says West.
For centuries, kippers – salted and cold-smoked herring – remained a cheap and nutritious dietary staple, not just to the British but through exports to Germany, Russia and the Baltic states. With the expansion of the UK railway network from the 1840s, kippering became big business: smoking the herring kept them fresh just long enough to reach inland cities, without the overpowering saltiness used traditionally to preserve fish.
The dish was considered a delicacy, eaten for breakfast by the hunting-and-fishing set and even Queen Elizabeth II. In the first half of the 20th century, herring was second only to cod in the list of Britain’s favourite fishes.
But by the 1970s, populations had collapsed. With herring fished beyond sustainable limits, the industry essentially vanished. Kippers were off the menu. “Many fisheries and herring processors went bankrupt as a result, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs,” says Erin Priddle, the regional director for the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) in northern Europe.
Decades later, these silver darlings are making a comeback. Top chefs, including Cyrus Todiwala, Rick Stein and Richard Corrigan, are putting herring and kippers in front of diners again. Sustainably sourced kippers are available in supermarkets such as Tesco, Aldi and Asda, too, with sales of MSC-labelled herring up by more than 25% in the past couple of years, and more than 2m tins and packets sold last year – more than double the figure from five years ago.
“Herrings are a wonderfully flavoursome fish that we seem to have forgotten about,” says Mitch Tonks, chef executive of Rockfish restaurants, who uses them widely in his establishments. “There is nothing like a good kipper for breakfast. My only qualification is they must be split, and on the bone – with lashings of butter.”
The herring also has a rich heritage, history and culture, says Suffolk-based artisan fishmonger and seafood consultant Mike Warner. And it’s very good for you. “It’s highly nutritious, rich in omega-3, vitamin B12 and vitamin D – it’s very affordable wild protein,” he says. “But people have lost the art of eating herring, and kippers especially are still considered quite old-fashioned.”
In part, that’s because the closure of the herring fisheries in 1977 coincided with a newfound era of “modern” cooking. This was the time of Angel Delight and frozen fish fingers. “There was this huge new revolution of convenience foods: you could just heat up packaged fish, your kids could put ketchup on it and they’d eat it,” says Linda Fitzpatrick, head curator at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Fife.
Nobody wanted difficult kippers any more. Quality control became an issue, too. “Poor-grade kippers [were produced] with added colouring to shorten the smoking time … [so] the quality went down,” says the maritime historian Mike Smylie. He now runs Kipperland, a mobile smokehouse and exhibition that aims to reinvigorate the British appetite for freshly smoked kippers, perhaps shredded in a salad, as paté or in kedgeree.
“They do have a wonderfully deep taste when smoked properly: smoky, salty and fishy,” says Smylie. “They’re full of healthy fish oils – people do recognise the benefit of omega-3 from [oily] fish. Plant-based omega-3 doesn’t convert in the body in the same way.”
Fluctuations in consumer demand for the humble herring are nothing new. When the first world war broke out and fishers were called up to fight, the export market collapsed, so in 1935 the Herring Industry Board was created to extol the fish’s health virtues, complete with celebrity endorsements: the glamorous movie star Merle Oberon featured on the cover of its recipe book with the caption: “Aren’t herrings delicious?”
Its popularity was helped when fishers switched from simple curtain-like “drift nets” to bigger and more efficient commercial pelagic trawlers, such as the West family’s Courage. “With increased industrialisation, ice production and trawling, white fish became more of an easy catch, and it became quicker to get to market. So the 1970s were definitely a tipping point,” says Fitzpatrick.
“Boats came from Denmark, Holland, Norway – even from the Faroe Islands, so there was a big pressure on the stock,” says West. “Vessels had got bigger, and purse seine nets and pair trawls were much more efficient [than traditional drift nets] … you could encircle and catch a complete shoal.”
Young herring also supplied the growing pet food and fish meal markets. “There were just so many pressures combining,” Fitzpatrick says.
With fish populations plunging, the UK government imposed a fishing ban in 1977 to allow North Sea stocks to replenish. When fishing resumed in 1983, West was surprised by the abundance of herring. “Big, strong, healthy herring were just everywhere,” he says. “It was a huge change. They made a quick recovery.”
By then though, demand had dwindled. “If you’re not fishing a very popular fish for more than five years and it’s not going into the market, the market is going to find something else,” says George Clark, the UK director for the MSC, the world’s largest fisheries certification programme. “[Herring has] probably been the victim of overfishing beyond just the stock itself – it’s about the culture of the product and the preference in terms of taste.”
Herring had been outflanked by another oily fish. “Suddenly, we could see the sea was full of mackerel, and it was so much easier to sell than herring,” says West.
Mackerel remains a valuable catch for British fishers today, although it’s not currently deemed sustainable and has not been MSC-certified since 2019, due to overfishing.
“Because of climate change, there are shifts in the stock that have created greater opportunity for other nations to increase their fishing. So total allowable catches were 40% above the scientific recommended volume – and the states fishing on the stock aren’t able to agree catches in line with science,” Clark says. “That’s the crux of why it’s no longer MSC certified.”
Many herring populations, however, now are. In 2008, MSC certified the North Sea herring fishery as sustainable and renewed that endorsement in 2022. Most kippers in Britain come from healthy North Sea herring stocks – though kippers were traditionally smoked using the slightly larger Atlanto-Scandian (AS) herring – a fishery that lost its MSC certification in 2020 because fishing nations could not agree on shared quotas in line with scientific evidence and stocks fell from 7m tonnes in 2008 to 3.7m tonnes in 2022, according to MSC.
“We only need to look back to recent history when overfishing and mismanagement led to the collapse of AS herring stock in the 1960s, and subsequent five-year closure of fishing activities, to allow the stock to recover,” says Priddle, who explained that joined-up management is “urgently required” to keep total quotas within sustainable limits.
In contrast, with stocks thriving for North Sea herring, the 2024 quotas will increase by 28.3%. During September, George West’s son Alexander and nephew Matthew caught 3,000 tonnes of herring from their 70-metre vessel, Resolute – about half the quota George and his brother David were permitted to catch in an entire year during the 1990s.
It makes West feel cautiously optimistic about the future, but he remains wary. “Herring are very resilient, but it’s not just fishing – there are so many factors that affect them,” he says, including the abundance of predators such as cod, or the plankton on which herring feed, both of which are affected by the climate crisis.
“There are lots of unknowns that we don’t have control over, but we’ll never reach the position we were in during the 70s again – it’s much better managed now,” he says. Every catch is closely monitored and regulations govern everything from mesh size of trawl nets to total allowable catch, so quotas are responsive. “We don’t want to overfish – we want our sons and grandsons to be able to continue in this industry.”
“At the beginning of 20th century, a lot of people thought you could just fish the seas as much as possible without much impact,” adds Clark. “We know that’s not the case because of the 1970s herring crash.”
Herring on the menu
Smoked kippers Split into a butterfly shape from head to tail, then gutted, brined and traditionally cold-smoked over oak wood chip for up to 16 hours. Often eaten for breakfast.
Painted ladies During the first world war, processors realised smoking fish for a shorter time meant they retained moisture and weighed more, so they fetched more money, and they added coal tar to dye the fish brown to look more like conventional kippers.
White herring Salted and cured in barrels for export, most herring was processed this way during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Red herring Great Yarmouth was notable for salting and cold-smoking whole herring for a few weeks to prolong the shelf life.
Bloaters Herring smoked whole, guts included, giving it a gamey taste.
Herring in oatmeal A traditional Scottish way of cooking fillets rolled in oats, then shallow fried.
Rollmops Herring fillets are marinated in vinegar, rolled up around sliced onions and held in place with wooden sticks.
Soused herring Fillets cured in salt then soaked in a vinegar and sugar brine. A range of additions to the marinade can include herbs, onions, bay leaves and juniper berries.
