Fisherette

These are little fish cigarettes where as you burn through the papers, it smokes the raw fish perfectly so then you get a freshly smoked haddock or whatever at the end of the session. Comes in all sorts of flavours - both in terms of variations on the raw fish that is packed into the fisherette, as well as the overall hue of smoker (the most popular are hickory, mint or bubblegum flavours).

There are two main brands of fisherette that can be bought in most major supermarkets. The first is Björn baby, Björn a company founded in the 1930s by an entrepreneur called Humfrid Persson who wanted to encourage children to get into the hobby of fish smoking. His company produced a full range of wooden contraptions and kitchen ware that let young children pretend to smoke stuffed fish skins (these were later replaced with an approximate acrylic alternative to avoid the smell) all the way up to handy smoke in your pocket kits for camping trips, even enlisting the Swedish Scouts Service (the SSS) to produce a special badge for fish smoking that children could earn and then proudly patch onto their uniform. The second company was Svart-Cancer, who were more pro-tobacco and even tried to develop an underwater nicotine system for fish which they fully developed but could never sell (famously they said that ‘not a sole would buy them because they had less money than the Greeks’).

Both companies eventually iterated into the well loved product we celebrate with this entry. Fisherettes come in little tins, with a football player card on them for kids to collect. However, it’s Swedish football, so a bit like American football is to rugby, so Swedish football is to soccer - a pale imitation that emerged when someone who had once attended a match tried to piece together what happened. In Swedish football there are 4 goals, 442 players and a single goalkeeper who doubles up as a referee, but is forced to walk on his hands. Due to the relative unpopularity of the sport, there are currently not enough players to put together a single game, but it is hoped another match can be put together for 2026 (if you are interested, an eventbrite registration link can be found via the Swedish search engine Göögle).

Fisherettes are the latest trend to emerge from Scandinavia, with the Swedish in particular always having a strange obsession with smoked fish and nicotine distribution systems. Other notable fish and nicotine delicacies often spoken about by tourists returning from swedish shores include:

• Salmonella: a branded spread made of smoked fish, often served with bananas and cream on a large billini

• Schlüß: like snus but instead of a giddy high from a small nicotine pouch, the chemical brings you close to death in order to enrich your life.¹ It’s a bit like bungee jumping but kept between your lips and teeth. Pop one in while you work, bring yourself to the brink of extinction all while sat in a meeting with HR about your hygiene/unexplained fishy odour. It is often said by trained professionals that the only remedy to any existential or nauxious despair (see the latest wrd-of-the-day monthly update for a definition of nauxious) is time, but now it can be solved with those on a busy schedule and kept as handily as one would a cyanide capsule.

Not to be confused with the many, many soul vocalist groups that were ten a dime back in detroit (e.g. Fintones, The Eelie Sisters, Susan and the Fish Flingers, Tbe Lady Basswallows, Calimari Five etc.)