Particularly amusing since surströmming is produced in my hometown
I often wonder how such foods become a part of our culinary landscape. A combination of fermentation gone wrong and winter desperation? A dare? A desire/need to waste nothing? I think there's also a kind of Nordic alcohol that is made from tree fermentation. It includes methyl alcohol, which is the stuff that can make you go blind. I can't find reference to it anywhere though, so maybe I've been lied to.
I don't know about fermenting trees, but lots of folk here in Norway drink hjembrent, or moonshine, especially out in the country. It's not legal, but popular none-the-less. In my part of Norway there's a local drink called karsk with a wonderful recipe: Place a one-krone coin in the bottom of cup. Fill with coffee until you can't see the coin anymore. Add moonshine until you can see the coin again. Enjoy! I got seriously messed up on karsk one night at a party way out in the country. It was terribly fun. And that one time was probably enough times for me!
Yeah, I had a good chuckle when I read that the author ate the thing as-is. Someone should have told him that you're supposed to gut them, remove the bones and put the results fillets on tunnbröd or eat them with potatoes. As for the taste, it's mostly just very salty. You can perhaps compare it with pickled herring, which doesn't taste very much either (apart from the pickling itself).
Norwegians have some versions too. The most famous "foul" Norwegian food is lutefisk, or "lye fish", which is cod soaked in lye for six days or more (maybe much more), until it looks like gray jello, but with fish structure to it. Many make fun of lutefisk, saying that it is Norway's way to celebrate old times when people were so poor they had to preserve fish in extreme ways. Lutefisk however prepared properly is delicious. Especially drizzled with syrup, brown cheese and bacon, with mushy peas on the side. This is coming from an American in Norway, mind you. A little more extreme is Råkfisk, which is trout that is salted and then fermented ("to ferment" of course means "to allow to rot" -- they are really just the same process) for one to three months. I've heard horror stories about råkfisk and so was reluctant to try, but try I did and while it was not my favorite, it really was not horrible either.
Hahaha. This man is a hero! Were it not for his brave efforts to contain the smell, the whole of Europe would be contaminated by now. His adventurous spirit makes me want to follow in his footsteps and try new kinds of food.As for the herring, I doubt I digested any more than a fraction of a gram of the stuff in the end. My body simply said “NO” to Surströmming.