Matjes
matjes
Dutch
“The word for virgin herring comes from a Dutch word for a young girl.”
Matjes is young Atlantic herring caught before its first spawning, when the fish's fat content peaks and the gonads have not yet developed. The Dutch word is a shortened form of maatjesharing, recorded in Amsterdam customs documents from the seventeenth century. Maatje is a diminutive of maagd, meaning maiden or virgin, applied to the fish because it had not yet reproduced. The curing process uses only salt, with no vinegar or heat, and is done aboard the fishing vessel within hours of the catch.
The Dutch herring industry in the seventeenth century was one of the largest food-processing operations in the world. Amsterdam alone exported over three hundred thousand barrels of salted herring per year in the 1640s. The gibbing technique, in which a herring is gutted but its pancreas left intact to continue enzymatic digestion during salting, was attributed by later tradition to Willem Beukelsz of Biervliet around 1380. The enzymes from the pancreas give Matjes its characteristic silky texture and mild flavor that distinguishes it from all other cured herring.
German merchants in Hamburg and Bremen imported Dutch maatjesharing from the fifteenth century onward. The German form dropped the haring suffix and settled on Matjes as both the fish and the dish, with the word fully naturalized by the eighteenth century. Matjes became a seasonal event in northern Germany: the first Matjes of the year, arriving in late May or early June from the North Sea, was eaten with chopped onion and new potatoes in a ritual that German newspapers still report annually.
The European Union now holds a protected designation of origin for Hollandse Nieuwe, the same fish under its Dutch name, specifying that it must be caught between May and July and cured according to the traditional process. The German Matjes season and the Dutch Hollandse Nieuwe season are the same phenomenon with different passports. In Hamburg the first barrel is opened at the Fischmarkt with ceremony; in Scheveningen the same ceremony happens a day earlier, because the boats reach the Dutch coast first.
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Today
Matjes arrives in late May like a seasonal clock. German newspapers announce the first catch; Rotterdam chefs plan menus around it; the Scheveningen harbor opens its first barrel on the quay with cameras present. The herring caught off the Dutch coast in May 2024 was cured the same way as the herring Beukelsz gutted in Biervliet around 1380. The word has not changed either: still the diminutive for a young girl, still describing a fish that has not yet grown up.
There is something honest about naming a food for what it was before it became food. The herring was young; the word recorded that fact; the word stayed. In an era of product names engineered for appeal, Matjes is just description. Call the thing what it was.
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