Maybe the Pickled Herring Went to My Head: Exploring My Roots in Sweden

In a life full of glorious experiences with food, I’ve never encountered what I just encountered. Throughout my childhood, Mom worked hard to cultivate my culinary palate, dealing with my squeamish rejection of avocado and mushrooms as a child and delighting in our collaborative work on Thai and Indian food. Traveling to Asia gave me a full on sense of embracing food as an adventure. I tried everything: the divine (you can read “Ode to the Rambutan” [bottom of the page] which I wrote in Cambodia for Jeff’s blog), the dangerous (my introduction to street meat in Delhi ended with a disaster that rivaled the joy of the carnivorous gnosh) and the delicacy (fish eyes in Taiwan).

All of these experiences prepared me just enough to take on a table full of pickled herring on Saturday night. At first thought, I eyed the table and took my plate elsewhere, preferring a more tame meal of meat and potatoes. But over my meal with a Norwegian woman, she spoke so highly of pickled herring that I began to think about it. When she told me that pickled herring was part of the culinary history of Sweden (and thus my family) I figured I had better give it a go.

A approached the spread, a gorgeous display of colors and a hint of the sea wafting up. Without further hesitation, I grabbed a new plated and carefully selected a piece from each of the seven samplings: black currant, garlic, ginger, oil and vinegar, dreaded (I’m leaving in this Freudian slip in [I meant to say breaded], draw your own conclusions) and a couple more I couldn’t identify in Swedish. I situated each piece on the flatware so as not to mix the flavors and returned to my seat. My plate, I thought, looked very tidy and Scandinavian.

With the spirit of the Almqvists embodied, I cut bite-size portions for consumption and tasted each selection. The fish itself felt good. A nice thick chunk. Firm. Meaty. The way that a tougher piece of sushi feels. Not chewy, but you gotta use your teeth. As for the flavors? Curious and intense. The herring itself carries a certain strength, so the sauces (or can I say picklings? Yes I like that better -- picklings is a superior, if not invented word) pack an equally powerful counter-punch. The smallest of bites kind of overwhelms a bit, especially for the neophyte. In the end, I polished off each piece. Though I will say that I don’t think I will be pining for the dish when I leave the fajaland.

Of course, pickled herring only begins to paint the picture of the weekend. My trip out to Gotland, the island off the east coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea, also brought my introduction to Kubb, a Viking lawn game. No, this isn’t some version of Viking croquet (my imagination is already running wild with that thought), its more like Viking Bocce. But it probably more resembles the rubber band shoot outs I used to have with my plastic army men when I was a kid. In fact, after playing this game twice, I became altogether convinced that the game itself was invented by two 7-year old Viking boys who wanted to create a game that legitimized their desire to throw sticks and rocks around the front yard field.

Literally, that’s the game. Each player gets three sticks and five small wooden stumps (about 8” diameter and 6” tall). You set up your stumps in a row and then you essentially have a shoot out. It’s a fairly brilliant game. Basically you are just throwing things around the lawn in a slightly ordered fashion. I love it. It’s close to a perfect game. It might not ever compete with my love affair with wiffle, but I plan on bringing it around the world. It certainly connected with my Swedish heritage a bit more than the herring.

But my heritage visit didn’t stop there. In fact, it continued on into a wander around Visby, Gotland’s central city, still basking in its Medieval design. For years it served as a trading hub of Scandanavia and the walled city packs in tightly along cobblestone streets, heaps of rosebushes and lovely tidy homes. My parents have long attributed the Christian faith in our family to my Swedish great-grandparents on my father’s side, people of quiet but deep and unwavering faith. It came together quite surprisingly in Visby, where cathedrals dominate the architecture.

There are chapels everywhere and each one is in some extraordinary decay. It seems that the guy who designed the walls (still standing perfectly) may not have been the same guy who designed the roofs (which have all collapsed over time. The result? Magnificent open-air cathedrals still used for services, concerts and public meetings today. Personally, I choose to believe that the true genius laid in the roof architect, not the wall man. Is it possible he designed the ceilings intentionally to create this radical effect years into the future?

So I’m peacing out of Sweden feeling well connected. I can’t make any firm conclusions about my connection with the ancients. At times it felt full on. At others? Not so much. In the end, I think its fair to quantify my feeling of connection at 25%, which would account for the amount of Swedish blood I have in my body. And if anyone is up for a game of Kubb while eating some pickled herring in a roofless Medieval cathedral. I’ll lead the charge.