thin slices of cold-smoked salmon or gravlax
smoked Baltic herrings (whole)
fish roe (vendace, rainbow trout or salmon)
1 - 2 Matjes herring fillets *)

lettuce (eg butterhead)
lemon wedges
hard-boiled egg wedges or halves
thinly sliced red onion
pickled beetroots
pickled gherkins
smetana, mayonnaise, crème fraîche or sour cream
fresh dill, parsley or chives, etc

Clean the smoked herrings: peel off the skin and detach the flesh from the bone. Discard the bone, head and tail. Cut the Matjes fillets in about 1 cm wide slices.

Since consisting of many ingredients, there are numerous ways of serving and presenting this dish, either mixing some ingredients with each other or serving everything separately.

For example, you may mix the Matjes herring slices with a sauce made of smetana and/or mayonnaise, seasoned with mustard, chopped dill and a dash of lemon juice, sugar and pepper, similarly to Herring à la russe.

Or you can finely chop a few slices of smoked salmon or gravlax and mix it with some chopped red onion and crème fraîche or sour cream. You can use this paste as a filling for small croustades or hollowed-out halves of hard-boiled eggs.

Serve the roe plain or mixed with some chopped onion and smetana, or use it as a garnish on top of hard-boiled egg halves or croustades. Plain salmon roe makes a beautiful garnish.

Mix and arrange the ingredients on each serving plate the way you like. Garnish with dill sprigs, lemon wedges, thin (red) onion slices, pickled gherkins and beetroots cut into small cubes, capers, olives, smetana, roe etc. Serve as hors d'œuvre, accompanied by an ice-cold vodka schnaps.

*) Skinned and filleted herring cured in spiced sugar-vinegar brine.

Recipe source: family recipe.