If you imagine a fish’s digestive system as one long tube, the stomach would look like a little pouch. The pyloric caeca, just behind the stomach, looks like the digestive tube grew a beard. It has a long shaggy fringe of fleshy protrusions. The small “hairs†of this fringe secrete digestive enzymes. They turn the crunchy parts of the small crustaceans that the fish eat red and soft. They activate the pancreatic enzyme trypsin, which breaks down proteins. And when they’re left in a dead fish, and then brine is added, those enzymes cause the salted fish to partially digest itself.
Sounds disgusting, tastes great—or at least great compared to regular salted fish. The process, called ripening, not only made the fish taste richer than other herring, it allowed the fish to keep longer than merely salted fish. This was not a minor accomplishment. It allowed the people in what is now The Netherlands to take over an international market by making the best-tasting staple food around, along with building bigger, more-specialized ships that went after shoals of herring far off shore and processed them on the boat.
These huge vessels were the first floating factories, making a hugely lucrative and widely-distributed product. What’s more, the processed food allowed nations everywhere to undertake longer journeys with more reliable provisions. Processed herring, the result of a tiny advance in chemistry, launched a nation, helped people travel the world, and changed history.
[Source: Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City]
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Topic: Herring Aid (Read 994 times)