Take all of the human beings on the planet—all eight billion of us—and you might fill no more than three or four schools of Clupea, the fish we commonly know as Herring. What's more, those billions of super-fast swimmers cruise entire oceans in tightly spaced, disciplined wedges that would put a West Point drill instructor to shame.
Much of Herring life remains a mystery, including the immense schooling, shoaling, and balling techniques they use to survive. No one knows exactly how many Herring schools there are crisscrossing the world at any given time, but the catch in 2010 alone—by humans that is, and not including the blue whales, sharks, cod, seals, and seagulls who feast on them—ran to a little less than four million metric tonnes.
So it should be easy to find Herring in every refrigerator and on every menu in town, right? Well, not quite. In fact, when we went to Scandinavia explicitly to feast on our share of the delicious whitefish, they were nowhere to be found. Fleets of empty Herring boats sat moored in every port along the Skagerrak, but in the restaurants, no one was serving them.
Familiarity breeds contempt? We couldn’t decide, since, going by history, Herring are by far the most ubiquitous food fish on the planet:
The British smoke them (Kippers), and the Filipinos dry them (Tuyo), both for breakfast.
The Japanese (Kibinago) and Dutch (Hollandse Nieuwe) eat them raw.
The Baltic Germans roll them up around an olive or pickle and call them Rollmops.
An even stranger name comes from Jamaica, where they grind them into a paste called Solomon Gundy.
The Russians dress them in cold pies smothered in beetroot (Seledka pod Shuboj).
The Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe chop them (along with liver, of course)—which is how they landed in your neighborhood New York deli.
Just about everyone salts, pickles, and adds them to some kind of fish soup.
Accurately or not, the one region we'd always associated with Herring dishes was Scandinavia. And even though the Baltic and Norwegian fisheries have been seriously depleted, we’d expected eating habits that ancient and venerated to die out slowly. But no joy for these Herring lovers—until our Aha! moment in downtown Oslo. The issue was that we'd been eating at the trendy, modern restaurants that abound in Scandinavia. And there isn't a hint of trendy about the modest, reliable, and indefegatiblely schooling and reproducing Herring.
So we repaired for lunch to the elegant Engebret Cafe, the oldest and most honored eating establishment in all of Oslo and Norway, and there, on the old-fashioned menu, found appetizers and main courses fixed a total of five ways. We ordered all of them.
We know you were hoping we’d somehow get out of Scandinavia without an ABBA video, but nothing (except maybe Herring) says Scandinavia like this band. This video—and the song that was playing at Engebret when we walked through the door—shows how and why the group took the Eurovision Song Contest of 1974 (and in short order the world)—by storm.