spelling with herring (courtesy forkthis.blogspot.com)

On Wednesday night, I competed in the Eighth Meeting of the World Record Appreciation Society. I was there to set a record. My task: to spell “I ♥ PICKLED HERRING,” in pickled herring, and then eat it, faster than anyone had ever done it before. For a thorough survey of the evening’s events, please see the excellent Fork This. What follows, rather, will be a highly personal, perhaps even ego-centric account. My sense of wonder, of new vistas in spelling and herring, stands between me and my scant objectivity. I still kind of can’t believe I did this. I find it hard to write about. Not traumatic. Just… different. More like writing about the first time I had sex than the first time I climbed a mountain. It wasn’t especially heroic, and it didn’t last very long. The buildup was pure anxiety; the aftermath, strangely peaceful, in a suddenly well-nourished way.

Before the event, I practiced at home, getting my spelling time down to about 2 minutes. I used Fairway herring. It’s okay herring, a relative bargain at $2/fillet, but it’s not going to make any memories, especially not after it’s been spelled with half a dozen times. I learned several things that may be of use to future competitive herring-spellers: the ♥ is the hardest part. Don’t go too big on the E’s, but don’t count on one slice to make your L’s, for if your herring is plastic enough to sustain the 90-degree bend, you don’t want to be putting it in your mouth. Repeated spelling, I was interested to note, causes pickled herring to lose much of its structural integrity. Fish may indeed make you smarter, whether you eat with it or write with it; but you must choose carefully which to do, for it’s a zero-sum game.

I couldn’t practice the eating part before the event, or I’d have nothing left to train with. Besides, it’s a fool who attempts competitive herring consumption with a belly already full of the stuff. Does the Great Kobayashi fill up on hot dogs before the big event at Nathan’s? I think not.

At the event, I got the real thing. And the real thing is always different.

During the brief mental short-circuit in which I signed up for the event, I contacted Jen Snow, at Russ & Daughters, on East Houston St., here in NYC. For those who don’t know, Russ & Daughters is the international temple of smoked fish, caviar, and pickled herring. In more remunerative days, I went there a lot. I haven’t been in much lately. The prospect of looking in on cases of pristine wild Baltic smoked salmon, Gaspe Nova lox, and their peerless sable (smoked black cod) was a little too much to bear. The old-fashioned salt-cured lox at Russ & Daughters is plenty salty enough without being doused in my tears of loss. Somehow, Jen thought that the idea of spelling with herring was pretty damn funny, and she offered to comp me the fish I’d need for my pesco-orthographic act. (This is the first time, incidentally, that I’ve accepted a comp even remotely related to this blog. On the principle of quit-while-you’re-ahead, it might also be the last. If you climb the highest mountain your first time out, what is there left to do?) Not to demean Jen’s generosity, but, as she herself pointed out, pickled herring is a bargain: even the premium product offered at her family store is a mere $3/fillet. That’s half again as much as Fairway, but we’re talking about something that’s easily twice as good. She also gave me a few other gifts: an official Russ & Daughters T-shirt (size XL: competitive eaters are like more like sprinters than climbers; their ranks are composed more of stout pillars than hanks of wire); a roll of official Russ & Daughters waxed paper, so I wouldn’t have to eat my herring directly off the table (I wasn’t concerned for the tables at the bar; they’ve seen worse); some literature that I didn’t read; and a bar mitzvah note: “ess gezunterhait! best of luck with the record-breaking.” What a gal, this Jen Snow. I didn’t look for a ring, but — cover your eyes, Missy — after this experience, I’d seriously consider realizing my father’s greatest hope, by marrying into the Russ & Daughters family. As it is, I am deeply honored to have been for a night what I believe to be the first officially sponsored competitive speller-and-eater in their four-generation history.

Suddenly it was my turn. Called up to the stage, I ran through the brief comedic introduction that I’d prepared on the ride up to the event. Somebody laughed, but I think it might’ve been about the guy with all the soda straws. I prepared the table, in the way Special Forces would prepare the battlefield, were they armed with a roll of waxed paper emblazoned with pictures of fish (come to think of it, such an approach might solve a few of our nation’s foreign policy problems). Before I began, I received another honor, in the person of Cathy Erway, of Not Eating Out in New York, who volunteered to act as my official spell-checker. Cathy’s a copywriter in her professional life, so she’s more than familiar with fishy words. For a major personality in the food-blogging world, she’s also incredibly modest — so much so that she neglected to mention that her new book is available for preorder from Amazon.

I poised myself above the herring. Its delicate, elemental fragrance — of brine and onion, the breath of the sea and the fruit of the earth — wafted up to me. The audience counted down: 3… 2… 1…

I reached for the herring. It seemed to leap into my hand, as if it were still alive, and had been waiting all these years to make the evolutionary leap from a swimming to a spelling creature. Truly, I felt as though I walked in the footsteps of Moshe Gehahkt, or Moses the Chopped, the 13th Century Portuguese Rabbi, who was so poor that, when he ran out of ink, he was forced to complete his scriptural commentaries in the only thing left to hand, a diced sardine.* The “I” practically spelled itself, which is unsurprising, since a straight-cut piece of herring resembles no printed character more, unless you count the em-dash or the underscore. I heard a murmur of esteem from Cathy, as I executed the tricky concave bridge of the ♥ with a specially-selected piece from the tail. I felt the shadows of audience members over me, as they came to the stage to witness my feat. Flashes popped, and throats howled, in horror or awe, I know not which. On I spelled, into PICKLED. I made the C in one piece, then added another for safety, and the K in another two. I didn’t go too wide on the E, a mistake that can really throw off the kerning, and blow your event if there are font-slurpers present, but improvised a quick oral bisection of a fillet for two out of three crosspieces. Then I was in the self-reflexive ♥ of it, spelling HERRING in herring. A Holiday Inn-style H, another bitten E, two quick R’s in succession, an I that threw itself on the waxed paper like a soldier on the barbed wire, an N that was, admittedly, a little sloppier than it might have been, and the coup de grâce, the G, finished with a neat serif from the tail-end of a fillet. All in all, about three-and-a-half herring fillets spelled out the words. I stepped back, just long enough for Cathy to verify that all was legible and correctly spelled; then I dove back in, to eat.

To the beat of the backup band playing the Jackson 5’s “A-B-C, 1-2-3,” I pulled one cut of herring after another into my mouth. “Faster!” the audience shouted, “faster!” from some distance, as not to get hit with flying bits of fish. I had to make haste. I stuffed slices of herring into my mouth two, then three at a time. The crowd cheered its approval. The herring formed a moist, fragrant clot in my mouth, as my esophagus played catch-up. I took a few seconds to chew and swallow, then reached for more, stuffing my mouth…

And then I was somewhere far away. The noise of the band and the crowd faded. I was somewhere above what I believe to be the Baltic Sea, then I was in it, surrounded by schools of shining, silvery fish, each but the length of my hand. They turned their eyes to me, which is to say that we swam in parallel. “You spelled us,” they seemed to say, “now scarf us down.” Then there was a churning, and I was on the deck of a rusted steamer, bound for New York. I shivered in the sudden chill, hunched under a rough blanket; and soon I was queued at Ellis Island, waiting for entry to die goldene medina, the promised land of New York City. Then teeming slums of the Lower East Side, as close-packed as the Baltic schools I’d swum through, then a beautiful neon sign, clean glass and lovely lox, beckoning, the unmistakable sign of Russ & Daughters — and suddenly I was back. I chewed. I swallowed. I threw up my hands in the international gesture for finished-eating-and-not-choking. I was done. My time: 3 minutes, 33 seconds.

3:33! (courtesy forkthis.blogspot.com)

I didn’t have to barf. Even at a speed and quantity not seen since my grandmother last cleaned out the snack table from a friend’s funeral, the herring remained remarkably light, tasty, and fresh. Each bite had been its own little joy. And, for all the applause I received, these were my true, tasty laurels. I had become a Word Record Holder.

official world record holder, and bar mitzvah

* This bit of history was the centerpiece of my introduction. You’ll understand why I think they were laughing at the soda straw guy.