Week Sixteen – Soft Herring Roe

This week’s entry is brought to you in association with ‘Corny’ – The cereal bar that’s simply a-maize-ing.  And it’s attempted jokes like that that make me the ideal candidate to be the first (I’m guessing) Face of Corny.

 

I’d like to apologise for my slackness in getting these exciting new food reports to you. I imagine that, given the gap between this and the previous entry, you have all been worried that I might have actually eaten something interesting and died of food poisoning.   Well, I hope you’ll be pleased to know that I am still alive and haven’t attempted to recklessly lick a poison dart frog or confused fugu with tofu and done myself a serious gastric mischief.  All I can say is that I’ve just not been eating anything new.

That is, until today…

This week’s food first is Soft Herring Roe.

Yet another ‘value range’ food first… Don’t ever come round mine for dinner!

I’ve eaten cod roe before.    I’ve even eaten caviar before (see Week Six).  So, I was pretty confident I knew what awaited me when I opened the can in front of me on the kitchen surface.  Fish eggs – small, round, fishy.  This would be an easy (and uneventful) food first.

I had a plan… I’d spoon the contents into an egg cup and craftily mould it into the shape of an egg.    An egg made of eggs – Genius, I thought. It would be like a play within a play, but with eggs.  I’d then lob it onto a slice of toast, eat it, write a mini-essay about the experience and then move on with my life.

Hmm, this doesn’t look like eggs…

Would you trust this man to stab you in the nut sack with his scalpel?

I pulled open the can and got the expected whiff of fish.   Events were unfolding as predicted – Until I looked at the contents… Strangely, the food inside the can didn’t look anything like eggs.  It consisted of a number of unevenly-shaped off-white blobs. Blobs that looked a bit like those plastinated organs from Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibition. If you don’t know who he is, he was the chap who chopped-up corpses on a Channel Four series Anatomy for Beginners whilst wearing a large black fedora.    Each week for four weeks, this man made my eyes water… He scalpelled his way through eyeballs, stomachs and the part that has disturbed me to this day is when he sliced into a gonad during an in-depth look at the reproductive system.  I still don’t think I’ve truly recovered from watching that particular piece of television.  [Men, if you watch the episode, I challenge you not to wince, cry and then seek the services of a counsellor when he makes the testicular incision. Women, make sure you watch the slicing and dicing with a man and watch him sob in front of you].

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes, that’s right, I was in the kitchen, not looking at anything resembling eggs…

I just assumed that during some sort of processing at the factory, the eggs had – for some culinary reason – been squashed into unappetising shapes.  A bit like pressed cod roe, I guess – but less regularly shaped.

I scooped the roe out of the can with a fork, spread it thickly on some toast and took a sizeable bite.

Not quite the egg on toast I was expecting…

The taste was underwhelming.  A bit like diluted sardines.  Mildly fishy with the consistency of pate. It was not unpleasant, but not especially pleasant.  It would probably fall into the ‘Meh’ category I’ve just made up to rank the tastiness of food.   [If you’re interested, the scale runs from ‘Incredibly Meh’ at one end, to ‘Decidedly Un-Meh’ at the other.   Not coincidentally, ‘Meh’ falls right in the middle].

With the small meal finished, I returned to my computer to do some research on what I had just eaten.  I had a few questions, but the first, and most important, was “why doesn’t soft herring roe look like eggs?”

Oh my goodness, I wasn’t expecting what I discovered.

Hard herring roe looks like eggs.  Soft herring roe, apparently also known as milt, is… oh God, what had I done?… the genitalia of male fish when they contain sperm.  I had just stuck a fork in the equivalent of a fish gonad, spread it on toast and eaten it without giving it a second thought. I had just done something far worse than the scene from Gunther von Hagens’ programme that had severely disturbed me – I had stabbed a sperm-filled testicle and shoved it in my mouth.  A disturbing shudder crept across my groinal area.  What had I done?

I felt dirty and violated – but probably not as violated as the herring that had involuntarily donated their reproductive parts to the food industry.

In future, I will try to do a bit more research before eating a new food – I don’t think I can face eating testes again.

See you next week (Or three, more likely!)

I’m just off to rinse my mouth out with bleach…