This Week on the Pantry Shelf: The Dish Even Grandfathers Forgot

There's forgotten, and then there's this forgotten. Most of the recipes we bring back here have at least one person in a Cape Breton kitchen who still makes them — a mother, an aunt, someone at the community supper table who never stopped. Tatties and herring is different. Ask around, and you'll mostly get a blank look, or maybe a flicker of a memory: "My grandfather used to talk about that," or "I think there was a barrel of it in my great-grandmother's cellar." It's a dish that has almost entirely slipped out of living memory, and yet for close to two centuries, it was one of the things that kept Cape Breton's Scottish settlers alive.

The dish itself couldn't be simpler: salt herring, soaked and simmered, served over boiled potatoes with fried onions spooned on top. No spices to speak of, no technique to master. It was built entirely out of necessity — a way to stretch a barrel of salted fish and a root cellar of potatoes through a long winter, long before anyone had a refrigerator or a grocery store to lean on. It fed fishing families and farming families alike, and it fed them for generations.

It mattered enough, in fact, that people sang about it. There's a Gaelic song — Sgadan Saillt' 's Buntàt' — recorded from Cape Breton tradition-bearers, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to how a diet of salt herring and potatoes built the kind of people who could survive anything the island threw at them. The Scots version of the tune makes the same joke: forget your beef and your beer, your natural food is tatties and herring, and it's what raised the toughest, hardest-working people around. It's the kind of song that only gets written about food that truly mattered — food that was eaten so often, by so many people, that it earned its own place in the culture.

And then, quietly, it disappeared. Salt herring stopped being a pantry staple once refrigeration and fresh fish became the norm. The barrels in the cellar emptied out and were never refilled. A dish that once fed nearly every household on this island slipped out of rotation so completely that most people under a certain age have never heard of it at all.

This week, we're pulling it back up from the cellar.

A simple, honest dish built the old way — salt herring, potatoes, and fried onions, nothing more.

Makes 4 servings

Finding Salt Herring: This is the one ingredient that takes a bit of hunting these days. A fishmonger serving an East Coast or Atlantic Canadian clientele is your best bet, and some Maritime grocery stores still stock it in barrels or jars, especially around Christmas and Lent.

The Butter Question: Some households used salt pork drippings instead of butter for frying the onions, which adds a smokier, more savoury depth. Either way is traditional — it came down to whatever fat was on hand that week.

Mashed vs. Whole Potatoes: Some families mashed the potatoes right into the herring and onion butter, turning the whole thing into one soft, comforting mash. Others kept everything separate on the plate. There's no wrong way — ask three different families and you'll get three different answers.

A Splash of Vinegar: A little malt vinegar drizzled over the finished plate was common in some households, cutting through the richness of the butter and salt.

Leftovers: Any leftover herring and onions reheat well in a skillet the next morning, often alongside a fried egg — a working man's breakfast that used up whatever didn't get eaten the night before.

My grandfather never made tatties and herring in the kitchen I grew up visiting — by the time I came along, it had already mostly disappeared from his cooking. But he talked about it the way people talk about things that shaped them without them fully realizing it at the time.

He used to describe the barrel that sat in the cellar of his childhood home, packed with salt herring layered in coarse salt, and how his mother would send him down with a lantern to fetch a few for supper. "You didn't think of it as a treat," she told me once. "It was just Tuesday. It was just what there was." He said the whole house would smell faintly of onions frying by the time he came back up the cellar stairs, and that smell, more than almost anything else, meant home to him.

I asked him once why she stopped making it, and he just shrugged and said the world changed — fresh fish became easy to get, and nobody wanted to keep a salt barrel in the cellar anymore when the grocery store was five minutes away. It wasn't a dramatic loss. It just quietly stopped being necessary, and once something stops being necessary, it has a way of stopping altogether.

When I made it myself for the first time this week, soaking the herring the night before the way he'd described, I kept thinking about that lantern trip down the cellar stairs. It's strange to feel nostalgic for a memory that was never mine to begin with — but that's what these old dishes do. They hand you someone else's memory, and somehow it still tastes like something.

"My father-in-law is in his nineties and grew up on the North Shore, and when I mentioned to him I was thinking of trying a Pantry Dispatch recipe this week, he asked if I'd ever heard of tatties and herring. I hadn't. He got this big smile on his face I don't see very often anymore and told me his mother made it almost every week when he was a boy.

I found some salt herring at a shop in Sydney and made it for Sunday dinner. He ate every bite, slower than I've seen him eat in a long time, and didn't say much of anything the whole meal. Afterward he just said, 'That's it. That's exactly it.' I don't think I've ever felt prouder of a meal I cooked in my life.

Thank you for putting this one on people's radar again. Some of these old men have been carrying these memories around alone for a long time."

— Margaret T., North Sydney

Margaret, thank you for sharing this one with us — it's exactly why we do this. There's something remarkable about a dish that can go silent for decades and then, in one bite, bring someone all the way back. We hope that Sunday dinner stays with both of you for a long while yet.

If tatties and herring has you curious about the salt fish tradition more broadly, keep an eye out for the small fish sheds and wharves still operating along Cape Breton's coastline, particularly in the fishing communities on the island's western and northern shores. A few still sell salt fish the old way, and some local elders and heritage associations run occasional demonstrations on traditional salting and preserving methods.

Check in with local heritage societies, museum programs, or community Facebook groups for fishing villages near you — these demonstrations don't happen on a fixed schedule, but when they do, they're a rare chance to see (and smell) exactly how a barrel like the one in my grandmother's cellar would have been kept.

Ready to explore Cape Breton's fishing heritage and old-fashioned pantry traditions? Use our Cape Breton Travel Hub to map out your perfect food adventure!

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Kitchen Companion helps you rediscover old-fashioned pantry classics and bring them back into regular rotation.

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Some things are worth writing down properly. Our Cape Breton Stationery Collection brings a bit of the island's coastline right onto the page — hand-painted lighthouses, rocky shorelines, and little bursts of local dialect that'll make you smile every time you flip to a fresh sheet.

Choose from spiral notebooks for your grocery lists and Sunday supper plans, a "Scone Along!" notepad that's perfect for the kitchen counter, postcards for sending a little island charm to someone far from home, and a sheet of stickers for whoever in your life still decorates their laptop or water bottle.

Whether you're jotting down your grandmother's recipe before it's lost for good, or just need something better than the back of an envelope, these notebooks make the everyday feel a little more like home.

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Tatties and herring doesn't ask for much — salt herring, potatoes, onions, and a bit of patience while the fish soaks overnight. What it gives back is a taste of the island's earliest kitchens, from a time when a barrel in the cellar was the difference between a fed family and a hungry one.

Ask an older relative if they remember it. You might be surprised who lights up at the mention of a barrel and a lantern.

Some recipes are worth bringing back exactly because they've been gone a little too long.

From our kitchen to yours.

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