Herring

Herring never travels alone. Find one and you have found a few thousand, sweeping the coast in shoals that scatter the light like loose change spilled across the surface. It is an oily fish with proper backbone on the plate, the sort our grandparents ate by the barrelful, and it will hang itself on a string of feathers without much persuasion. For all its history, it remains one of the most rewarding fish you can land from the shore.

How to spot it

Picture a compact, streamlined fish with flanks and belly of clean silver and a back washed greeny-blue, the head and gills running noticeably darker. What settles it is the scaling. Herring carry large, loosely-set scales that come away at the lightest touch and leave your fingers glittering, so a fish that has already shed half its silver onto the deck is almost always a herring. Most run 20-30cm. Put that size together with the silver-and-blue colouring and those shedding scales and you can pick it out from the other small shoaling fish that turn up on the same rig.

Where it lives

Herring crowd the whole of our coast and they are rarely solitary, shoaling in their thousands wherever the water runs thick with plankton. Their timetable is worth learning. After dark they lift towards the surface to feed, then sink back into deeper water as the light builds through the day, so where the shoal sits depends on the hour you fish. The shore angler's window opens in the warmer months, roughly June to September, when the fish push in close enough to reach from the rocks and piers.

Catching it

Forget bait for herring; a rig of small bright feathers does the job far better. Cast a herring rig out, count it down through the water, and keep changing the depth until you connect, because the shoal might be hard on the surface or four fathoms under it. Once you find the level, stay on it. The feeding clock favours an evening or night session, since that is when the fish rise to hunt. From the shore, pick marks that drop quickly into deeper water. As for what you keep: herring stocks have been hammered before and only recovered through careful management, so take a handful for the table, slip the rest back, and leave the shoal to thicken for the next tide.

In the kitchen

This is a fish that wants boldness, not restraint. Start by getting it on the day it lands; that oily flesh turns fast. For a quick supper, grill it hard with a fistful of coarse salt so the skin blisters and the oil renders. But herring really earns its place in the larder once you cure it. Rollmops are pickled herring. Buy them from a reputable supplier and follow the storage and use-by instructions; this guide does not provide a validated raw-fish pickling process or shelf life. Smoking is the other classic, turning herring into kippers that need nothing but a hot pan and a poached egg.