Salad "herring under a fur coat", or how to peel herring

Every time I decide to make my favorite "herring under a fur coat", I have a dilemma: to buy a whole fish carcass or ready-made slices of fillet. It seems that I know how to clean herring, and I know how to do it, but I want to save my own time and do not bother with picking the bones. On the other hand, in stores, herring fillets are sold in vegetable oil or with the addition of various spices, which can not but affect the taste of salad. Therefore (most often) common sense takes precedence over laziness, and I buy a whole salted herring.

What else, besides fish, is needed for a salad? The ingredients are as follows:

- two medium beets;

- two large carrots;

- five potatoes;

- four chicken eggs;

- mayonnaise.

Vegetables and eggs must be washed, boiled until cooked, cooled, cleaned and grated on a small grater in separate plates.

It's time to fish. How to peel herring? Take a cutting board, cover it with food film or plastic bag, then with a paper towel. So we will get rid of the need for washing the board of fish residues.

Take the herring, open her abdomen - from head to tail - with a sharp knife, we pull the insides. Caviar or milk can be left, if you eat them in your family, but you can throw it away. We remove the intestines and a thin black film that covers the herring from the inside. Cut off the fish head. Now you need to make a deep incision along the ridge, cutting out the dorsal fin. Also remove the fins on the abdomen and near the tail. From the side of the head, we cut the skin with a knife and gently pull it towards the tail. If you do not make sharp jerks, the skin is easily separated. The fish is cleaned, but the herring is not cut. It remained for us to separate the fillets, which we do: first, on the one hand, then on the other. The bulk of the bones will remain on the ridge, but some costal bones will have to be selected manually. Do this carefully: nobody needs a bone in the throat . How, to clean the herring you did not like? Try to involve your second half in this process, as it has long been known that joint cooking brings together.

Cut the fillet into small pieces, start to collect the salad. We take a flat and, preferably, oblong salad bowl, where we put all the ingredients in the following order: beets, herring fillets, potatoes, eggs, carrots, beets. Each layer, except for the lowest one, is smeared with mayonnaise. When preparing a salad, I do not use salt, enough of what is contained in fish and mayonnaise.

And do you know that there is a legend about creating a salad "herring under a fur coat", according to which "Shuba" is an abbreviation? It stands for "chauvinism and decline - boycott and anathema". The salad was invented in 1918 in the tavern of the Moscow merchant Anastas Bogomilov in order to reconcile representatives of various social strata. The fish symbolized the proletariat, whose favorite food was dishes with herring, beets - revolutionary Red Army soldiers, and vegetables - peasants. The cook, who knew well how to clean herring and how to cook vegetables, decided to combine all the ingredients and flavor them with French mayonnaise. Visitors to the tavern really liked the new dish, which, moreover, was an excellent snack for drinking. They ate more, less drunk, and accordingly the number of fights and quarrels decreased. And they presented the salad just on the eve of the New Year, and since then they started associating "herring under the fur coat" with this holiday.