Explore the savoury tradition of smoked herring
In 1962, 10-year-old Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc and his eight-year-old cousin Norbert Gaudet would be up at crack of dawn on schooldays, arriving at Basile Cormier’s smokehouse plant (boucanière in French), and stringing herring on sticks. Then home to wash away the fish fragrances, change their clothes and be off to school. They’d be back at it on Saturdays too, each making two cents per stick, working toward batches of 100, each batch earning them $2.
It reads like Dickensian-era child labour, but to LeBlanc, it feels wholly innocent, warm and memorable. It was, after all, their way of life.
The early days of working in the smoked herring industry along the Cap-Pelé shores of New Brunswick was a “complete family affair” as LeBlanc puts it, from harvesting the fish, transporting the catch from the shores to the smokehouses, often using horses and carts, and then beginning the process of curing, smoking, packaging and shipping the end product off to market. Basile Cormier was, for example, Norbert Gaudet’s great uncle on his mother’s side.
As young Acadians dashed off to university and other livelihoods during the ensuing decades, the employment pool in the region diminished, forcing the recruitment of Quebecers and Newfoundlanders through the 1970s and 1980s to pick up the slack. Today, Mexicans, Jamaicans, and Filipinos constitute most of the work force.
It’s a labour-intensive trade. After the harvest and transport to the plant, preserving fish by smoking requires brining them for five to seven days. Workers then string the herring on long poles (called “cannes”) that hang in the smokehouse for five to six weeks, where workers light the fire using softwood and saw dust, keeping it burning to produce smoke, while avoiding too much heat production, which would cook the fish. Those who keep the fires burning have acquired a specific technique, which is essential to ensuring the quality of the product. They’re said to “hold the secret of the fire.”
The smoked herring phenomenon is an extension of the region’s natural resource: the waters off the coast of the Cap-Pelé area have always been shoals for herring. During the 17th century, French explorers called the area Cap Hareng (Cape Herring).
Spring became synonymous with herring season and most families built small domestic herring smokehouses in their backyards, some, according to LeBlanc, resembling outhouses. The tradition’s origins date back to the time of the first French settlers, strongly influenced by the knowledge acquired from Indigenous people, who also smoked fish.
Over time, the Acadians developed their own techniques but it was English-speaking settlers from Chimougoui (Shemogue) and from the Bay of Fundy’s Grand Manan Island who taught them the technology for commercially-producing smoked herring
It was as early as the 1840s when small domestic smokehouses began to appear on farms and at homes. By 1922, there were five commercial operations in Bas-Cap-Pelé, with one in Trois Ruisseaux. Willie E. Landry (whose building is today listed on the Register of Canada’s Historic Places) and Thaddée S. LeBlanc built two of these.
Thaddée learned the skills associated with the industry from a man who by all accounts was an entrepreneurial genius. Born in 1875 in Baie Berte, N.B., industrialist, financier, politician, educator, and benefactor Fred Magee began his life in business by opening a general store in nearby Port Elgin by the age of 22. He then spotted a much greater opportunity, exporting canned lobster, from which he was never to look back. Magee went on to create a line of canned goods that also included smelts, herring, and vegetables. He fed the smoked herring canning side of the business by establishing three plants in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia.
In 1956, 25 operations produced a million cans, or 8,200 tonnes, of product. By the late 1990s, that had risen to two million units valued at $40 million and employing 435 full-time-equivalent jobs within a population of approximately 4,000 people.
Today, with 20 smokehouses remaining in operation, the Cap-Pelé region is responsible for 95 per cent of Canada’s smoked herring output, leading some to call it the smoked herring capital of the world.
With all the culinary glamour swirling around oysters, lobster, mussels, crab, salmon, and haddock, it’s easy to see how the humble herring, often used for bait or turned into low-value products like fish meal or manure for growing potatoes, was destined to get lost in the fishery economy. But as in other parts of the world — such as Europe, where herring is a prized delicacy with a rich history and cultural significance — along the Northumberland shores of New Brunswick, the herring has a deep heritage and long-established markets.
Smoked herring was slow food long before there even was such a movement. Smoked herring checks off the right boxes in the slow-food concept: it’s an ancient method of food preservation that has been practised for millennia in coastal communities. It represents the values associated with traditional and artisanal food practices, heritage, and sustainability.
There are two places the area where travellers can learn about the industry. The Cap-Pelé region’s smokehouse heritage is illustrated and described in detail at the modest but well-curated Smokehouse Museum in Cap-Pelé, within a building that also functions as a visitor information centre with a modern café.
In the Magdalen Islands, Fumoir d’Antan is a third-generation Arseneau family business that has emerged as an industry leader and also the official Smokehouse Économusée, one in a network of exclusively-themed operations in Quebec. According to Économusée guidelines, a so-designated site must include a retail operation, a museum aspect of the product being made, and the opportunity to witness artisans at work on-site — clear and contemporary evidence that the trade is alive and well.
Recipe
IF YOU GO
Smokehouse Museum
2463 Acadie Rd., Cap-Acadie/Cap-Pelé, N.B.
Open June–September.
Le Fumoir d’Antan
27 Chemin du Quai
Havre-aux-Maisons, Magdalen Islands, Que.
Open seasonally.