For 30 years, I turned up my nose at my dad’s
favorite fish. Then I tried it, and finally understood its briny appeal.
By Shira Klapper
I can’t remember the day I became aware of herring. It
would be like remembering the moment I knew there were such things as trees or
hands. Nor can I pinpoint the first time I took note of my father’s Saturday
morning herring routine. But I do know that by the age of consciousness, I could
expect Saturday mornings to unfold this way: My father would get dressed, go
downstairs, open the refrigerator door, take out a shallow plastic container,
and carefully open the lid to remove three or four pieces of pink, shimmering,
oily herring, which would slide and wriggle onto his plate as if they’d just
been plucked from chilly waters off Scandinavia. And just as consistent as my
father’s routine was the way my mother, my siblings, and I would react: with a
combination of horror, disgust, and mimed gestures of gagging. In fact, so great was our disgust with the smelly, slithering fish, that for a while, we made my father eat the herring outside. In the New York winter. In the snow.
While herring never touched my lips for the first 30 years of my life, I knew things about herring, just like a child who grows up in the schmatte business knows a thing or two about exports and imports. For example, I knew that not all herring is created equal. In fact, herring is so varied that a man’s choice in herring is nothing less than a window to his soul, a way of showing the world whether he is a kind, philosophical man, or a bore who never once stopped to smell the flowers. In the class hierarchy of herring, I was taught that matjes, my family’s choice, was for the classy, discerning, sophisticated people; pickled was for people who, though good and upright, did not have the finest taste; and schmaltz—God forbid, schmaltz—was for the shtetl folks, the peasant people who temperamentally are simply not able to discriminate.
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