Re: Untasty Food

Sally Caves wrote:
>
> > Ever heard of a Swedish dish that's usually called fermented herring in
> > English? (The Swedish term is "surströmming", lit "sour herring".) I
>have
> > never actually eaten the stuff, but the smell is intolerable 20m away.
> >
> > Some years ago, one of my classmates put an opened jar of it in a
> > ventilation duct at school. He got fined the equavilent of a few dozen
> > dollars, and was expelled from the school for the rest of that semester
> > (which only was some week, but still). And of course, a few hundred
>people
> > were very angry with him ...
> >
> >                                                   Andreas
>
>Are you talking about pickled herring?  That's a staple in Swedish cooking!
>We had a Swedish Restaurant back in Claremont CA and pickled herring
>was one of the dishes.  It's in sourcream.  Am I thinking of something
>else?
Maybe. If it it indeed is the same thing, it's certainly no staple of
Swedish cooking - of the hundreds of Swedes I know (I'm one myself, of
course), only a handful considers the stuff edible.

>At any rate, it was delicious.  The sourcream probably softens and contains
>the smell.  Very salty.
If it is the same (you should speak with some more gastronomy-inclined Swede
than me), you may be surprised to hear that it was "invented" by trying to
make salted herring with insufficient amounts of salt - so little that the
stuff ferments. It's a traditional dish of the Norrland coast, where people
used to have trouble affording salt (Sweden is one of the very few countries
that actually imports salt). Now, of course, it's done on purpose.

                                                   Andreas
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