Surströmming — Rotten Fish from Hell

I’m in Stockholm, Sweden, visiting two old friends Chris and Liana. We were housemates in grad school. Dan and I ended up getting married and the two of them got married. Some called our house the love palace.

My challenge ended up being eating Surströmming, a Swedish delicacy. If you look up “Surströmming” on Wikipedia, this is what you will find.

Surströmming (pronounced [sʉ̌ːrstrœmːɪŋ], Swedish for “soured herring”), is fermented Baltic sea herring and is a staple of traditional northern Swedish cuisine since at least the 16th century. Just enough salt is used to prevent the raw fish from rotting (chemical decomposition). A fermentation process (which converts sugar to acids, gases and alcohol) of at least six months gives the lightly-salted fish its characteristic strong smell and somewhat acidulous taste.

When opened, the contents release a strong and sometimes overwhelming odour; the dish is ordinarily eaten outdoors. According to a Japanese study, a newly opened can of surströmming has one of the most putrid food smells in the world, even more so than similarly fermented fish dishes such as the Korean Hongeohoe or Japanese Kusaya.

In 1981, a German landlord evicted a tenant without notice after the tenant spread surströmming brine in the apartment building’s staircase. When the landlord was taken to court, the court ruled that the termination was justified when the landlord’s party demonstrated their case by opening a can inside the courtroom. The court concluded that it “had convinced itself that the disgusting smell of the fish brine far exceeded the degree that fellow-tenants in the building could be expected to tolerate.”

With that in mind, this is what I was able to do.

 

Yeah, I choked down two entire fishes. That’s more than this macho guy was able to do. To fully appreciate what I had gone through, check out this his video.