[Leica] Re: Kippers and other smoked fish

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

On Oct 11, 2006, at 5:32 PM, Marc wrote:

> Kippered Herring or Kippers actually began as
> kippered salmon and herring was only subjected to
> the process towards the end of the 19th
> century.  The process is proprietary -- it
> involves splitting and gutting the fish and then
> salting it and cold-smoking it.


I'm not much of a kipper fan but I love all forms of smoked salmon,  
gravlax and whitefish. Some of the best smoked fish in the world is  
made by the Hansen smokehouse on the Hudson River a few miles north  
of my house. Hansen (http://www.hansencaviar.com/) has been in  
business for over a century and a half and got its start smoking  
sturgeon. Sturgeon was once so plentiful in the Hudson estuary that  
it was called "Albany Beef" and served as a cheap staple food for  
Irish laborers who were building New York City. The Hansen site is  
interesting because it has century old pictures of the sturgeon  
fishery with 200 lb. fish stacked up like cordwood on the docks.  
Hudson River sturgeon caviar was said to rival the best Beluga  
caviar. I can't say for sure if this is correct but the few times  
I've sampled it, it was excellent. Barrels of caviar were exported to  
fish egg lovers in Europe. In the 1890s you could get a  big plate of  
caviar in Luchow's restaurant for five cents. Naturally the sturgeon  
were fished almost to extinction. All sturgeon fishing is now  
prohibited in the USA and the Hudson estuary fish are making a slow  
comeback - probably about 50 years before former levels are restored.

A couple of years ago a former local commercial fisherman who does  
occasional maintenance jobs for us caught a pregnant sturgeon  
(illegally) in a snare. His father, one of the last caviar processing  
plant workers, declined to process the eggs into caviar saying "It's  
not worth the effort to treat only 30 lb.. of roe." The caviar lovers  
in the community were heartbroken. To keep on topic, I took some  
pictures of the dead sturgeon with a Leica IIIc with a 50 mm f3.5  
Elmar, a camera produced while the sturgeon fishery was active.

Larry Z