Smoked and Salt Fish

Then came a puzzling object, hot, dark brown in colour, and smelling strongly of smoke; it might be the mummified remains of a fish that has crawled up some chimney by mistake. I scraped a fragment of this anatomical specimen and found it strange to the taste but not bad; not at all bad.

Kippers and haddocks nowadays are for me one of the delights of England, and I wish certain friends in that country, instead of sending me stupid novels to read, would hollow out the printed text with a chisel and then insert a kipper or two. How grateful I would be!

G. Orioli, Adventures of a Bookseller