I am not exactly superstitious, but I do like to follow tradition, particularly to find new traditions that have some type of good-luck-bringing significance. The New Year always sends me on a hunt for these types of traditions. Several years ago, I was searching for a special dinner to have on New Year’s Eve. While I love black-eyed peas, pork and collard greens, one of the more commonly known lucky meals to serve, I wanted something fishier. I was happy to find a variation on this dish that swaps the pork for fish — fish with skin, specifically.
The silvery scales of fish skin look a bit like shiny coins and are thought to symbolize prosperity in the coming year. One of the most traditional fish to eat on New Year’s is herring. This comes from the Scandinavian culture where herring were often eaten on New Year’s in hopes that the next year’s catch would be plentiful. It can be eaten fresh but is more commonly pickled in a variety of sauces like wine, mustard, cream sauce or dill or smoked. Kippers are another preparation of herring that simply refers to the fact that they are cut using a butterfly method.
Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) is one of the most common native fishes off our coast. They are shiny, silver, narrow-bodied fish that don’t get much longer than a foot. They swim in large schools that can contain billions of fish. These schools typically migrate from inshore areas in the summer to areas further south and offshore, like Georges Bank, in the winter. They are filter feeders and feed on plankton, making them an important part of the marine food chain. Herring have long been a valuable species in Maine. Historically, the large quantities of small herring, also known as sardines, supplied the many canneries that existed along the coast. This was during the peak of fishery and was a time when people were major consumers of these oily packed little fish. At their peak, Maine canneries employed thousands of people in over 50 canneries. Traditionally, herring were caught in weirs where a seine net would be placed at the mouth of a cove to trap the schooling fish. In the 1960s, large foreign fishing boats came to the Atlantic coast and caught herring using modern electronic technology that helped them to find and capture large schools of herring. This resulted in a crash in the population in the 1970s. Over time, one by one, the canneries along the Maine coast closed. As a result, many New Englanders’ familiarity with and taste for tinned fish.
Now, we think of herring primarily as a bait species for the lobster fishery. Larger boats fish for herring using a net they tow through the water known as a midwater trawl or a purse seine that they use to surround a school of fish. The herring fishery is highly regulated to protect the stock and has, for that reason, been very limited in recent years. This has been a challenge for the lobster fishery. For example, landings in 2016 totalled over 78 million pounds as compared to 2020 landings of just over 11 million pounds. Nevertheless, they remain a highly valuable species among Maine fisheries and are a sustainable choice for consumers due to the strict management of the fishery.
Herring are not only a sustainable choice, but are also a healthy one. They are a high source of vitamin B12, vitamin D, and omega-3 fatty acids. The benefits are even higher if you eat the skin, which is a fish part all too-often ignored (and one that might bring you good luck in the New Year). If you’re trying to make a meal of them, I highly recommend swapping out smoked herring for pork, lentils for black-eyed peas and kale for collard greens.
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