At the close of the sixteenth century the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe wrote a remarkable story called 'The Pope and the Herring'’, in which he explained how the English red herring was invented by an absent-minded Yarmouth fisherman. The fisherman had mislaid some salted herring and after a fruitless search, they eventually turned up some months later in his chimney, where they had been transformed to an impressive red colour in the smoke. They also tasted really good and he quickly made his fortune by selling this new delicacy both at home and abroad. He even travelled to Rome where he conned the Pope's caterer into buying a very stale one. However, His Holiness fainted when he smelt this over-ripe fish coming to his table!  He woke up, having had a miraculous dream in which the red herring revealed to him that it was really the lost soul of a long forgotten martyr - so the red herring was canonised and buried with great pomp in the nave of St Peters!

The red herring was a bloater-like fish much favoured by Tudor tavern goers. Its extreme saltiness induced a great thirst, which just had to be quenched with large helpings of strong ale. This Elizabethan equivalent of salted peanuts or crisps was usually broiled over a chaffing dish of charcoal and was a popular snack for rich and poor alike. It would have been far too salty and heavily smoked for modern taste, but this was necessary at the time, because there were no refrigerators and the fish were usually stored by hanging them from the rafters.

Herring was once an important food for coastal dwelling Cumbrians and they were preserved in various ways - by salting, pickling, sousing and of course by hanging them in the smoke of smouldering wood or peat. Salmon was also preserved by being salted, smoked and then dried in the sun - a kind of smoky salmonid baccalà, which needed to be reconstituted by soaking it in water before cooking. Known as kippered salmon, this preserved fish was very different to modern smoked salmon. The name kipper was transferred to a smoked herring in the 19th century, so the original English kipper was actually a smoked or dried salmon.

Meat slowly smoked in the hooded chimneys of Lakeland farmhouses was also an important element of the local diet. Every kind of meat was prepared in this way – pork, mutton and beef – even veal. Sometimes whole carcasses were cured in brine or by rubbing them with salt, sugar and saltpetre and then hanging them up in the smoke. Some of the larger fireplaces could accommodate half a dozen or so carcasses hanging on hooks known as ‘buggas’. However, curing meat in a chimney this way often resulted in a dried out, rather hard product and the fat often melted in the heat. So some farms had separate ‘smoking closets’ into which a steady stream of cool smoke could be directed from the main fireplace. One of these closets survives at the National Trust’s Townend Farm in Troutbeck.

An ancient  North Western delicacy called hung beef was smoked over peat and was much admired in the South of England for its ‘toothsomeness’. However, the most popular local smoked meat was ‘powdered mutton’, usually a ham from a sheep of at least four years old, which had been cured with salt and treacle and smoked over juniper wood. I have been making these for some years now and they are very special. ‘Powdered goose’ was also common – the powder referring to the salt in the cure mix. This is particularly delicious and would be well-worth reviving.