Exxon Valdez Strömming

I've been hearing about surströmming since before I arrived in Sweden.  This fermented herring is legendary for its odor, though I hadn't been told much about the taste, and since I like to consider myself an adventurous eater I was more than willing to test the waters, as it were.  A couple of weeks ago our municipality had a street festival for the surströmmingspremiär.  As I understand it, the fish is canned in the spring and ferments until the third Thursday in August when it makes its smelly debut.  I am not exaggerating when I say that the stand where it was sold fragranced an entire city block and lingered on our skin and minds for days afterwards.  And it wasn't the kind of dead fish smell you might imagine; it was an industrial scent, like cutting oil from a manufacturing plant or a factory smokestack.  Furthermore, no matter how much I tried to disguise it with onions, potatoes and that Zingo, the flavor was exactly what I imagine fish might have tasted like from the Gulf of Alaska in the spring of '89.