PICKLED HERRING (C)1991 Alan M. Schwartz Were you to venture forth in search of piscine victuals, visiting your friendly neighborhood seafood restaurant to luxuriate in the oral enchantment attendant to a fine fish dinner, I posit that the word "herring" would never enter your mind, or stomach. The herring is not renowned for its delicious flavor, its subtle texture, its satisfying appearance, the bravery or skill of its fishermen, or anything else that would recommend it as a casual food. The herring is amazingly abundant and, given the choice between it and annual winter starvation, Northern Europeans proved to be remarkably inventive in exploring the myriad taste adventures possible - not that it made the stuff any easier to force through your mouth or any less likely to catapult out of your stomach as your alimentary canal recoiled in horror. My forebears bore forth from the Pale of Settlement, Lithuania and Rumania, shortening their last names with a vengeance and dropping their ethnic identities like steaming road apples, desirous only of coming to America and taking over. Their outward demeanor could be mistaken for any other lower class scum with enough intelligence to instinctively relocate north of the Mason-Dixon line. Their private culinary passions retained their Old World origins, rife with gustatory repugnance. Thus it is that I in my maturity, my grandparents' grandson, sit here before a rather sophisticated microcomputer, typing away and munching on pickled herring, while the cat gags. Pickled herring is the raw fish (already a dubious proposition) scaled, gutted, beheaded, betailed, filleted, but not skinned, dumped into a mixture of vinegar, pickling spices, and coarsely chopped raw onions, and let mature for a suitable number of weeks. The nutrients of barley could be preserved as beer, grape juice delightedly stores as wine, and cabbage gained indefinite longetivity as sauerkraut, the forever vegetable. The folks back in the old country were on a roll, and tried it with fish, hoping to stockpile protein. The color of pickled herring is the dull grey white of very old, never bleached cotton underwear. The smell of pickled herring combines the best, or at least the strongest, intimations of raw fish, vinegar, and raw onions. The texture is that of sodden, crumbling leather. The flavor of pickled herring is repulsive, hideous and dreadful, and marvelous. I sit here and my mouth waters, jets of saliva fountaining down my teeth. The cat is going after a hairball, his flanks rhythmically caving in as he extends his neck and makes awful gurgling coughs. Babies will nonchalantly drink bleach or eat their own feces, indifferent to smells and tastes adults find ghastly. It is at this moment of life that the thoughtful ethnic parent scoops a spoonful of chopped pickled herring into the toddler's mouth. In the manner of the oral polio vaccine, early and repeated introduction of pickled herring into the mouth of baby triggers a whirlwind of biochemical permutations, altering cerebral microstructure, and forever addicting that hapless tot through adulthood and until death to the appalling siren song of raw fish and onions in vinegar. I have been reshaped by evil ancestors. My weakness is not my responsibility, but my ecstasy is mine alone. I am going to take another mouthful, even as the cat slinks away with his tail lowered. I once worked for a Swedish corporation's American subsidiary. I was delighted that the contents of a small glass jar that could clear the entire company cafeteria merely served to attract my employers. With the steely glint of Viking berserkers in their eyes, they in turn unwrapped some lutefisk. They laughed and sung, patted me on the back as one of their own, and we all munched a morsel. It was now my turn to slide down the vortex of incipient nausea. My internal organs shifted to Full Emergency Reverse as the stuff passed my teeth, and I bolted from the table. Lutefisk is a genuine test of manhood. Lutefisk is sun-dried codfish buried for months during the Scandinavian winter. It is disinterred, reduced to convenient aliquots with a hand saw, boiled in lye to make it vulnerable to the insubstantial trespasses of human teeth, cooked again until achieving translucency according to the passions of the household, and served with bread, butter, and denials of responsibility. Lutefisk training must surely begin in utero, because Codfish a la Drano cannot be any diploid organism's idea of a good time. It sure as hell wasn't mine. The progenitors of my progenitors were culinarily bounded to the north by lutefisk and to the south by twice-rotted milk (bleu cheese). I am satisfied that they took the middle road with the acidic agony and ecstasy of pickled herring.