Day 767: Surströmming

Last weekend a friend from England was visiting for a whistle-stop tour of Sweden and so I did what any good friend would do and took her to eat partially rotten fish from a can.

Surströmming (sour herring) is actually a bit of a novelty food item that many Swedes from southern Sweden have never eaten and many Swedes from northern Sweden have. All promulgate the idea that surströmming is semi mythological and can only be eaten outdoors because there is a rule against opening the can where people can smell it and be offended or killed. It's actually partially fermented herring, left to mature in a can, which rots slightly. The rot is washed away in running water and the remaining fish tastes like FISH+++++

source: wikipedia

As we discovered you are allowed to open the can indoors and the smell is more offensive than the average fart but less offensive than a sewage treatment plant. Both of these comparisons are shit (har har) because surströmming doesn't smell anything at all like human waste. It actually smells, well, sour. Think if sour had a scale of sourness and we were looking at the absolute end of the sour scale. I don't even think it smelled fishy, but maybe I'm remembering poorly because my nose was being stabbed with sour forged into metaphorical sour shards. Actually it wasn't so much the nose that registered the sour as the whole olfactory system including the tissue at the back of the throat. As to the idea that you shouldn't open the can indoors, I don't think the smell could actually forge non-metaphorical tools and force its way into adjacent rooms or apartments. I'm not exactly selling the product here with my description, the smell wasn't half as dire as I imagined the smell should be after two years of living here and hearing others hyperbolise about it, but in any case it's not a smell which inspires lip smacking and salivating.

Västerbotten cheese, source:wikipedia

The person hosting the sour fish event was a northern Swede and just got on with the damn eating as soon as possible. She took the fish whole from the can and carved out the entrails and got some big bits of fish in her face before the smell from the can opening had time to waft to my end of the table. My English friend was much more hardcore than me and, despite gasping at the the stench and asking herself thrice why she was doing it, got stuck in straight away without instruction, using her hands to pull out the bones. I ummed and ah-ed about whether I was even going to eat one, before realising I would be annoyed at myself if I didn't. Putting the fish in front of you is basically embracing the smell wholeheartedly into your life and welcoming it onto your hands and into your aura. I'm quite bad at deboning regular fish, so I was not doing too well with the surströmming. I managed to pick a few meagre shards of fish away from the frankly disturbing swim bladder, bones and entrails and I shied away from the roe which the other guests were so keen on. Amateurs usually go for the ready filleted fish, but it was no regular who bought these fuckers.

Sandwich: source here

The redeeming feature of surströmming is that you don't generally eat it by itself unless you're some kind of demented purist living in a shack in the woods with the bears, wolves and elk somewhere up north. Instead you make a sandwich using crisp, cracker-like bread, onions, potato and västerbotten cheese. If you wish to further disguise the fish you can add sour cream (which I did) and drink milk (which I did). My sandwich was about 1% fish in the end, but I still got goosebumps while eating it. Probably from looking at the swim bladder on my plate while I chewed. To best describe the taste I would probably use a combination of two comments made at the dinner; one person said the fish tasted like "the sea", namely the smell you get a low tide when there is some old seaweed struggling on the sand and there's a salty flavour in the air; I myself commented that it was like being punched in the mouth by a bodybuilder fish with hench arms. Put these together and you get a sensation akin to a knuckle sandwich from Neptune himself.

Would I eat surströmming again? Well. Yeah, probably. If there was a decent crowd, plenty o' vodka and good times to be had as a novelty, rare occasion. Would I go northern native and eat sour, rotten fish for my dinner on any old regular day? No.