PopSci's Friday Lunch: a Can of Surströmming With Harold McGee
Food-science expert McGee and adventurous culinary technologist Dave Arnold invite PopSci to sample rotten fish When Popular Science was acquired by Sweden's Bonnier Corporation in 2007, some people thought we'd be eating surströmming, the legendary Scandinavian delicacy of fish left to ferment in cans till the cans almost burst, every day. But in fact, the famously putrid herring has been utterly absent from these shores -- until today, when Dave Arnold gave me a call inviting me to come crack open a (ominously bulging) can of it that he'd smuggled back from Sweden. Joined by Harold McGee and several other Friends of Dave with assorted degrees of gameness, we cracked the can open in a well-ventilated park. It didn't squirt vile juices for meters, as I'd been told to expect; just fizzed and bubbled a little as the noxious gases vented from their confinement. The air filled with the odor...