The House Built of Herring

I like food that tells a story. Honest food. I don't like liars. Apples that shine with airbrushed perfection but lack the tart and tactile snap of a small winter Baldwin. Tomatoes that please Vanity Fair but taste like the paper on which their advertisement is printed. I like food that connects me to a place. In Alaska I eat halibut and huckleberries. In Arizona I eat tomatillos and chiltepins. In Maine I eat steamer clams fresh out of the tidal mud. In Wyoming I might accompany my ranch-to-restaurant elk burger with a salad of greens grown in Jackson Hole's futuristic Vertical Harvest indoor garden. But the most storied and least appreciated food I enjoy are herring.

Herring are the most abundant fish in the sea and have had a historic role in feeding people. Viking and Roman middens host heaps of herring bones. Herring were the staple food of medieval Britain, known, writes herring historian Mike Smylie, as "the potato of the Middle Ages." In France, he writes, the first mention of the herring fishery appears in a charter of about 1030 of the Abbey of St. Catherine, near Rouen, allowing a saltworks near Dieppe to pay the abbey "five milliards" (five billion) of herring. I'm not sure if this was a tax or a tithe. Welsh fishermen in the fourteenth century paid tithes in herring for Mass to be said on their behalf. Salt herring, along with cornmeal and a little salt pork, kept enslaved Africans alive on southern plantations; Frances Fredric wrote that he was given one salt herring for breakfast during the winter months. Herring fueled the Industrial Revolution, the staple food of coal miners and mill workers. Herring have been caught, salted, barreled, dried, and smoked for centuries, but Napoleon, seeking to keep his army alive long enough to satisfy his military ambitions, awarded a cash prize to the inventor who first sealed herring in glass jars, the first instance of "canning," followed shortly by preserving fish in actual tin cans. Though "herring" and "sardines" are generally synonymous, they are not really the same thing. In New England a juvenile herring becomes a canned sardine but in Sardinia a pilchard becomes a sardine.

In the North Atlantic, where I have spent summers on Grand Manan Island at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy since I was a child, herring (Clupea harengus) migrate in shoals up to nine miles long, millions of fish that know how to keep the just-so distance from each other while racing and turning and feeding as one shining mass. Herring are lean and muscular, silver with blue-green flashes on their dorsal sides. They have big eyes, small heads, and bulldog jaws. Their journeys span the water from North Carolina to Greenland, the fish moving from spawning to feeding grounds and then into deep water for wintering. They are wily group hunters, feeding on copepods, tiny crustaceans that are the predominant zooplankton in the sea. Herring practice "ram feeding" in fearsome bands of synchronized swimmers that keep the distance between them equal to the jump distance of their prey. If the copepod leaps to escape the predator, it lands right in the mouth of another herring. Of course there are plenty of predators adept at gobbling herring: hake and whales and humans. Still, herring mean abundance, their conservation status of least concern to marine biologists. But try telling that to the weir fishermen of Grand Manan, where for two hundred years, herring were the mainstay of a thriving culture that made this island of 2,500 souls the sardine capital of the world in the 1880s, when islanders packed one million boxes (twenty thousand tons) of locally caught and processed herring for export. In the 1930s nearly a hundred weirs—the graceful structures of sixty-foot-tall stakes, birch top-poles, and netting that capture fish as they school shoreward to feed—skirted the island's shore. When our family began visiting the island in the 1950s there were still plenty of weirs, smokehouses operating in each of the island's five...