Sour herring

Any attempt to make this topic more illogical or ludicrous than it really is would be futile. So, the content of this page is pretty much straight, just as it was extracted from that other crowd-sourced encyclopedia.

Sour herring means something specific if you happen to have grown up in Scandinavia (something along the lines of "Uncle Dave's opening the can of sour herring -- Run!!") but out here in the rest of the world the meaning is a little vaguer.

It can refer to a form of rotten fish, which is prepared by placing it in cans without cooking it and then waiting for the can to swell up. After it "ripens" it's good for lots of things, possibly the most important of which is crowd control at parties that are getting out of hand. You open a few cans of it and as the gas hisses out, you'll be surprised at how rapidly the room also clears out.

It can also refer to a different form of rotten fish, which is placed in a barrel and left outside for about six months, after which, if there's a famine in the area, it's eaten. (I don't know what you do with it if there isn't any famine. Use it for rat poison, maybe?)

It can also refer to herring mixed with lye. (That's not a typo.) First you mix it with lye, then you spread salt on it, then you cook it, and then you find someone you really hate and feed it to them.

Note that if you're starting with fish you took out of a can that had swelled up from the gas pressure inside, mixing it with lye before you (attempt to) eat it might actually make some small amount of sense. (Burying it in the garden to help the plants grow might make even more sense, of course.)