Taste Test: Surströmming
A traditional Swedish dish whose name means soured herring. "As long ago as the 16th century, surströmming was supplied as army rations in the 30 years war. Swedish soldiers who did not come from the area where this was staple food, as well as foreign conscripts, refused to eat it."
If it smells so bad that people were refusing to eat it during the Thirty Years' War, it smells pretty bad.
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Normally, I'd say every culture has a "strange food" that others look at askance or with disgust, and that it's normal for others to be suspicious of it. But between this, lutefisk, and fried brain sandwiches, I'm beginning to think the Vikings and their Scandinavian descendants are trying to prove how tough they are by eating things that would make a buzzard ill.
We could call it "soured herring" or just get real and say "rotten fish." But I imagine there's a lot I could make myself eat if my growing season were about two weeks long.
On the other hand, I very much like Vietnamese fish sauce, which is fermented, which is to say, a bit spoiled. All in the microbes, I guess.
I like kimchi. And I'm a huge fan of the noble art of fermentation, as far as that goes. :)
Fermented fish, though... ah, I don't even like fresh fish all that much.
You all should try this stuff:
http://www.eattheweeds.com/corn-smut-mexican-truffles/
I've seen it supermarkets around here.
Challenge accepted. I'll see if I can locate some.
What with the amount of rotten milk I eagerly eat... including milk so rotten it's gotten solid, and has veins of blue rot running through it....
That picture literally nauseates me a little, but I consider how I'd look at cheese if I hadn't grown up eating it as a normal food.
While there are some cheeses I would not put into my mouth (such as Casu Marzu) for the most part, cheese is not particularly scary looking or even smelling. It's not really rotting, merely molding. And the molds involved are edible, so you can look at it as just an extended form of growing edible crops. Mind you, I understand that the majority of humans are lactose intolerant, and it's those of us of European descent who bred that trait out. So cheese, in that context, is pretty weird.
And there's some frightening plants out there as well (Durian comes to mind). But for the most part, all these local exotics are pretty inoffensive. Even the renowned kimchi is fermented plants (and thus has a kinship with alcohol, so hey... at least it's in good company). But fermented meat is where I draw the line. That and adding lye to food. As I said, I wonder if this isn't just proving how tough you are. Cause that is liquefied flesh achieved through decay processes. Yeowch.
The English author and publisher Frank Harris described in his memoirs about being served "high" game, that is you hang the thing up by it's legs and let it hang until the carcass falls off them. Or something like that.
Pheasant this way apparently resembled a pool of green goo on the plate. Harris wasn't a fan.
He did however, consider cold roasted pheasant and champagne to be the best meal there is. (Always wanted to try that).
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