I came across something in one of the books I’m reading right now that made my stomach curl up in a little ball and hide. The book is Viking Age Iceland. Here’s the section, from page 50:
When a dead whale was found like this, how were the pieces of meat and blubber stored? The Saga of Gudmund the Worthy provides some information. It mentions that after a long stand-off, a chieftain rewarded the men who had stood by him by opening his brother’s whale storage pits [hvalgrafir]. He gave each man three loads of whale meat, which they carried home with them. In such pits the meat and blubber fermented, a form of preservation. In a similar manner, Icelanders down to modern times preserve and eat rotten shark and skate fermented in their own juices, the process benefiting from the ammonia found in the urine.
Erm… yuck? So, they take rotten shark meat, and then place it in a vat so it can be preserved by its own ‘juices’, including its urine. I try to be fairly open-minded about food, and I’m usually willing to try anything once, but… rotten shark meat preserved in its own ‘juices’? No thanks. 
Technorati Tags: food, iceland, icelandic
24 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link
http://system13.org/2006/10/31/icelandic-cuisine-rotten-shark/trackback/
October 31, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Mrs Lifecruiser
YUK. that’s even more gross than the fermented herring some Swedes eat…. It smells rotten long way and the flies love it.
I’ve tasted one bite camouflaged with a lot of other stuff and washed down with alcohol, but still no hit
I read somewhere that the Japanese loves it and import a lot of cans per year. They must have gone totally insane!!!!
Or maybe their noses fell off…. *lol*
October 31, 2006 at 10:11 pm
Josh
Yeah, YUK indeed.
So you were brave enough to try rotten fermented herring, huh? You have my respect! There’s no way I could do it.
November 1, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Kristin K. W.
Okay; if you ever visit Norway do not ask for traditional food, ask for McDonalds
November 1, 2006 at 7:51 pm
Josh
Thanks for the advice Kristin. I take it you Norwegians eat something on par with rotten fermented shark meat, then?
November 1, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Joshua J. Slone
Just don’t ask for the Grilled McRottenfermentedfish.
November 2, 2006 at 7:02 am
Kristin K. W.
I don’t think the fish is rotten anymore, but we have some strange food like roosted lamb head (on the ‘Westland’). So don’t ask for McLambHead either
November 2, 2006 at 10:26 am
Zeitlos
Rumor has it that this is even worse than Pumpernickel…
November 2, 2006 at 10:40 am
Josh
Hah! I don’t know if I believe *that*. That was some of the worst tasting stuff I’d ever had.
November 2, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Mrs Lifecruiser
I just remembered that Norway have another kind of fermented fish, called Rakfisk, that goes back to the medevial time.
Actually it’s very tasty (at least the one I’ve tasted that a friend of ours in Norway offered us
and is prepared for several months in a lot of salt.
It seems like quite a procedure though to take care of it.
November 3, 2006 at 8:59 am
Josh
Prepared in several months in salt, huh? That sounds sort of like plain old salt preservation.
I might be willing to try that…
December 5, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Donnalorka@msn.com
I was in Iceland last New Year’s - my boyfirend and I knew an Icelandic family we spent time with. We actually ate the shark you speak of. I spit mine out, it was cold and was so amonia Potent! My boyfriend did swallow his - However the next day we found out how it’s made: The shark, salt & Nasty Man HUMAN urine is combined in a container then buried under the ground for 6 months. GAG!
December 5, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Josh
Gag indeed, Donnalorka. Gag, indeed.
January 4, 2007 at 4:57 pm
little miss
I lived in Norway for a while, the food sounds extra weird but it’s not that bad. And if they say its raw then it has been most likely either salted or dried.
May 8, 2007 at 12:03 pm
sif
ok ok ok enough allready! i am icelandic and i love rotten shark it is an Icelandic delicacie yum yum you have to try to eat it at least 5 times untill u start to actually like it, it is very funny seeing foreigners try to eat it. Although, i do understand, the poor things. My boyfriend, who is english, tried it once and he almost died he he he! But the human urin thing is just a funny myth to scare people even more.
May 8, 2007 at 12:25 pm
sif
here is a lovely discription of it hehe enjoy.
I eat with a person who shows no mercy. “We start with the shark,“ he says, proffering a plate of innocuous-looking cubes of fish alongside the traditional accompaniment, the local Brennivin potato and caraway schnapps known as Black Death. “People say the shark is awful, the schnapps is awful, but together they’re good,†he tells me.
Rotten shark hits you first with a strange smoky fishiness that’s at least bearable if not exactly what you’d call moreish. Then, as I chew (and God this stuff is chewy), a blast of ammonial gas brings tears to my eyes, which hasty gulps of the Black Death only worsen. As I weep, I think to my self I HAVE SURVIVED A SHARK ATACK!!!
May 8, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Josh
sif: Thanks for your native perspective.
July 18, 2007 at 3:17 pm
jdog
i have tried rotten shark and its the best
November 7, 2007 at 2:54 am
j hevonen
Why do wimpy English/Americans always refer to fermented products as ‘rotten’? That’s ludicrous. If fermentation is ‘rotting’, then beer is rotten, cheese is rotten, pickles and sauerkraut are rotten.
November 7, 2007 at 8:35 am
Josh
j hevonen: Good point. I like cheese, pickles, and sauerkraut. I guess we just have a thing against rotten (fermented) meat. That’s what we’re socialized to. For us, rotten meat = bad, dirty, smelly, to be thrown away.
November 19, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Snowman
Some minor corrections to that ‘urine’ talk.
“The shark itself is poisonous when fresh due to a high content of URIC acid, but may be consumed after being processed (see below). It has a particular ammonia smell, not too dissimilar from many cleaning products. It is often served in cubes on toothpicks. Those new to it will usually gag involuntarily on the first attempt to eat it due to the high ammonia content. It is usually eaten with a shot of the local spirit, brennivin.” Wikipedia
Skate, however, WAS urinated on to preserve it due to a shortage of salt. Now it’s not processed like that anymore.
Oh, might as well point out that I’m a native of Iceland and don’t touch that stuff. Sheep heads, on the other hand, especially the tongue …
November 20, 2007 at 9:23 am
Josh
Snowman: Hey, welcome to the site.
You know, the longer this post has sat here, the more often I’ve thought that either A) I copied the text from the book incorrectly or B) the book itself was wrong. I tried checking the text at Google Books, but alas, no preview is available of Viking Age Iceland. I did, however, find some more information about hakarl, which might explain why the author said what he said:
That certainly doesn’t say that the meat is soaked in shark urine, but at least it explains why the shark meat has to be processed in such a way. (As an aside - how in the world does a fish develop to not have a urinary tract? Is that common?)
I don’t know whether I’d try sheep head or not. I’d have to see it prepared first. I know I wouldn’t touch the tongue, though; cow tongue is fairly popular where I live, among the older people, but I won’t touch the stuff. I have a hard time eating meat of any kind - tongues, fish, etc. - when I can see what it was before it ended up on my plate. Silly, perhaps, but that’s me.
November 22, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Snowman
Heya!
Always learn something new. Had no idea about that shark deformation. So uric acid is that then, gah, small wonder is tastes worse than it smells (or so I hear).
Sheep heads are delicious!!! Just gotta be careful not to bite yer own tongue.
November 24, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Josh
Snowman: Welcome back.
Glad you stuck around.
How does one go about eating a sheep’s head? Do they literally put the whole head on your plate? I’m thinking of the scene in Indiana Jones where they’re served monkey brains - perhaps that’s why the idea is a turn off for me.
March 14, 2008 at 1:27 pm
justin
i actually quite like rotten shark i had it when i was visiting the scandanavian countries with my family during the summer