This week, while traveling for work, I went out for dinner with two people I didn’t know well and ordered salmon, which in the way of things naturally led to me explaining the existence of this newsletter and one of my dining companions, a Norwegian, excitedly asking if I’d ever had a blur of consonants—or, in English, mackerel in tomato sauce. I’d had mackerel in tomato sauce, I said—I did not mention that I’ve eaten it with peanut butter—but not the specific kind he was talking about, and he went on to explain how he’d grown up eating the stuff and delighted in watching repulsed Americans spit it out. This is how I ended up shoving a tin and a box full of six small plastic tubs of Stabbur-Makrell brand mackerel in tomato sauce that his mother had sent him as part of an annual care package full of Norwegian foodstuffs into my travel bag. There wasn’t really room for them, but there’s always a way.
As the Norwegian explained to me, this is the kind of traditional food that Norwegians joke about expecting to die with their grandparents, something associated with childhood that you eat for lunch and as a snack. (Norway, a country where tins of liver paste feature smiling, cherubic children, ranks among the world leaders in life expectancy and, more nebulously, quality of life. I don’t know which way the causality arrow runs, but probably you’ll get better results from oily fish and liver as convenience foods shoved at children than from Uncrustables.) He raised two key points. The first was that tin and tub are distinct: The former, which he prefers, features a fillet of mackerel in sauce, while in the latter, the mackerel is finely minced with an equivalent amount of tomato sauce. The second was a strong recommendation to have it on rye bread with butter—not, he emphasized, mayonnaise.
When I returned home, I put all the fish, in its various varieties, in the refrigerator. The next day, I bought a lovely loaf of sourdough rye from Lost Bread Co. and went to work, toasting and buttering some bread—I’ll have it on or, as many Norwegians apparently recommend, topped by mayo around the same time I cut my left leg off with my pocketknife—and putting some sauerkraut in a bowl and then getting down to business.
The tin was pungent and “fishy.” (I mean this as a euphemism for the fact that when I first opened it its funk carried, for just a moment and before it dissipated, a hint of a resemblance to cat food, something I don’t want to emphasize because I after all went on to eat and enjoy it and don’t want to dissuade you or for that matter make you think I’m weird.) (Despite the efforts of the vast marketing apparatus of the tinned seafood-industrial complex to associate its product with the complexity and sophistication of specialty makers whose products are in no way “fishy,” many worthwhile tins are, and that’s worth bearing in mind if you’re ever trying out mackerel that isn’t being presented as avant-garde spectacle. Anyway.) The tomato sauce was thick and the fish resistant and mildly stiff as I mashed and spread two-thirds of the contents of the tin on the toast, then salted and peppered them. The results showed me why Norwegians apparently call this “plane crash.”
At the moment of truth, I decided that to hesitate would be to lose and tore in. It was … good! It was good, my main grievance being that it was fairly bland. The sauce—almost closer to paste—was thick and sweet, the mackerel richer and more tender than its dry texture under the fork would suggest. This was hearty and sat light, and with a hardboiled egg and an apple (and some hot sauce) it would be great for a day when I was working outside. I would have this again; if I saw Stabbur-Makrell in the store for less than $3.50 or so I would buy some; I have a difficult time imagining craving this so much that I would want to spread it as a condiment. And yet I was confronted by the reality that I owned small plastic containers about the size of a single-serve tub of cream cheese like the ones they give out here in Philadelphia, a city where a disturbing number of food purveyors think that a customer who orders a toasted bagel with cream cheese wants to themselves wrestle a small amount of cream cheese out of a tub with a flimsy plastic knife and then spread it.
The next day, armed with some plainer rye bread from Ric’s Bread—the sourdough rye, while amazing, was a bit dense for the purpose—and the leftovers from the tin, I recreated the same lunch I’d made the day before. The minced mackerel with sauce from the tub went on, as you’d expect, smooth and easy, and, presumably in part because of the increased ratio of sauce to fish, had no notable fishy funkiness.
I didn’t notice any real difference between the two slices and what you’d expect from the differences in texture and the amount of sauce in each. (I did firmly conclude that in either preparation, this needs some herbs and aromatics in addition to some spice.) I preferred the tin but it occurred to me that the less fishy variety, in a quantity this small, could be useful in acculturating a small child to mackerel in tomato sauce—not a bad thing if you intend to raise either a child or a nation that prefers oily fish, with its protein and vitamins and good fats, to Uncrustables. On its own terms, though, the amount of protein and vitamins and good fats in a 22-gram tub is fairly negligible, implying a existence of a use case involving spreading the almost unseasoned mixture of mackerel and tomato paste mainly for the flavor and the umami, like Marmite. For all the power of childhood associations, it’s one I find it difficult to imagine having developed. This successful experiment, though, has me wanting to try some Northern European tins, now that it’s getting to that time of year when it’s dark and gloomy and boiled potatoes, thick, heavy bread, and small fish in mysterious sauces start to seem more appealing.
Housekeeping
—While I still haven’t eaten that krill, I eventually will, and will report back with results.
—This newsletter has been even more sporadic than usual this year due to (uniformly positive) professional happenings and obligations; I think I’ll be sending it out somewhat more often going forward, though, so if you have any requests please let me know.