"Herring has a bad 'wrap,'" says Kim Wall, owner of Ma Baensch Foods, 1025 E. Locust St., who's full of fish humor. "People just need to think of herring as the Northern European sushi."

Wall, who lives in Bay View, bought the business in July 1999 from the Baensch family. Lina "Ma" Baensch and her two sons started selling pickled herring in 1932, during the Great Depression. In 1954, Ma moved the company to the Locust Street building, which was formerly a Patrick Cudahy meat locker.

But after 70 years and three generations, the Baensch family put the business up for sale. Wall thought buying the business made sense on many levels. Not only was she already a successful businesswoman in the food industry, but she had gained a lot of marketing experience as the first marketing director for the Historic Third Ward Association.

Plus, her grandfather had been a fisherman, her father was a fish lover and she, coincidentally, had stored her kitchen utensils in a herring box for years.

Baensch Foods is now a member of the National Fisheries Institute and is kosher certified through the Chicago Rabbinical Institute. In order to make the business kosher, Wall traveled with her rabbi to Nova Scotia (where the herring is imported). "Nova Scotia is beautiful," she says. "Except there are a lot of dead porcupines."

After buying the business, Wall implemented another change, this time, to the label. It originally featured a picture of Ma that Wall felt made her look mean, so she swapped it with a friendlier-looking portrait. It also sported a graphic of two men in a fishing boat, but Wall removed the men from the boat image because the savvy businesswoman says, "I wouldn't need men on my boat."

But despite all the changes to the label, Wall kept the Baensch recipe exactly as Ma originally created it.

Baensch herring tidbits are imported from Nova Scotia in late June or early July. Herring is caught in the North Atlantic (usually at night when there is little or no moon), and then skinned, filleted, trimmed, packed in big blue barrels with a special German brine made specifically for Baensch Foods (most herring is packed in a sweeter Swedish kind) and shipped to the Locust Street plant where it is put into individual jars.

To ensure the highest quality, fresh Spanish onions are packed into the wine sauce jars, and pure liquid sugar is used to get great flavor.

"My herring is the 'baensch'-mark for quality in the seafood industry," jokes Wall.

Because most people eat herring over the winter holidays (it is considered good luck to eat herring on New Year's), it's packed six days a week from October to December. During the other months, sales slow down and "Ma B" employees pack only a few days a week.

Herring is an easy-to-serve snack that requires no preparation -- you just spread it onto a cracker and devour. It's also an inexpensive (about $3 a jar), low-fat food that's high in Omega-3 fatty acids, thought to prevent heart disease.

Long ago, Grandpa used to say, while sitting on the davenport, "These fishes are dee-licious!" And today, Wall is working hard to reel in a new generation of herring lovers.