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Vendace
Vendace (Coregonus albula), Small, short-lived and plankton-feeding — about as low-risk as fish gets here.. The national eating advice, why it applies, the rules that matter when you catch it, and what the kitchen changes about the numbers.
Where it lives
A small silver relative of the whitefish, rarely much longer than a hand, living in cold, clear, deep lakes and in the northern Baltic. It shoals in open water, feeds on zooplankton, and is fished with fine-meshed seines and trap nets. In Finland it is a national food — fried muikku is what a lakeside summer tastes like — and in Estonia the Peipsi vendace fishery has run for centuries.
Why the advice says what it says
If you want the fish with the least to worry about on this whole page, this is it. Vendace feeds on zooplankton, which is one step above the bottom of the food chain, so nothing biomagnifies into it. It lives only a few years, so there is very little time to accumulate anything. It is small, so there is no old-large-fish problem. And it is caught in quantity, cheaply, close to home. No national advisory restricts it, and it is the fish that national advice implicitly means when it says "vary your species". Vendace is also eaten in the way that makes small fish nutritionally interesting: whole, floured and fried, bones included, which turns it into a genuine source of calcium in a way filleted fish never is. The roe is a separate delicacy, sold by the spoonful.
The advice
| Who it applies to | What the advice says | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone, including children and in pregnancy | No frequency restriction. A short-lived, low-trophic fish. | Finnish Food Authority (Ruokavirasto) general fish advice |
| Anyone told to cut back on pike, perch or Baltic salmon | This is the obvious replacement: oily enough to be worth eating, small enough and short-lived enough to carry very little. | Reasoning from the life history above |
The rules
What the rule book says about this fish, described by instrument rather than printed as a number:
- Vendace fisheries are managed mainly through net mesh size and seasonal closures rather than through minimum sizes, because the fish is small by nature.
- Some lakes close during autumn spawning.
- Seine and trap fishing needs the appropriate gear permit; this is not usually an angling species.
- The Peipsi rules, shared with Russia, govern the largest Estonian fishery for it.
In the kitchen
Rolled in rye flour and fried hard in butter until the bones are crisp, eaten whole, head and all — that is the canonical treatment and it is the right one. Smoked vendace is the other classic. Because the whole fish is eaten, it delivers calcium from the skeleton, which is the nutritional argument for small fish in general.
This is a reference page, not a fishing licence and not medical advice. Minimum sizes, closed seasons, bag limits and licence prices are set per country and per water body and change most years, so no number for them is printed here — each species page says which instrument sets the rule and where to look up the figure for the water you are standing on. If a clinician has given you a fish frequency or a contaminant instruction, that instruction outranks anything on this page.
Nutrition figures
| Per 100 g, raw | Amount |
|---|---|
| Energy | 98 kcal |
| Protein | 19 g |
| Fat | 1.9 g |
| Carbohydrate | 0 g |
| Fibre | 0 g |
| Salt | 0.1 g |
| Published row | Cisco, raw |
Related published rows:
- Cisco, smoked — 177 kcal per 100 g
Typical round weight for the calculator: 30–100 g.
Eating advice: Finnish Food Authority and Swedish Food Agency national advice on Baltic and inland fish. Contaminant ceilings and the Baltic derogation: Regulation (EU) 2023/915; weekly tolerable intakes: EFSA methylmercury (2012) and dioxins/dioxin-like PCBs (2018). Nutrition figures: USDA FoodData Central rows published on this site. Checked 2026-09-06.
Frequently asked questions
Are the bones in fried vendace a problem?
No — that is the point of frying it hard. The skeleton of a fish this small crisps completely and is eaten with the rest, which is exactly why small whole fish are a meaningful calcium source and filleted fish are not.
Fish in the same advice group
Whitefish
Moderately oily but low in the food chain; no frequency advisory.
Rainbow trout (farmed)
Farmed on controlled feed and harvested young — the oily fish with no advisory attached.
European smelt
A short-lived spring fish that smells of cucumber; nothing to limit.
All species compared
The full table, grouped the way the advice groups it.
Eat the fish, log the fish
TempoLife tracks what you actually ate against the same food data linked on this page, so a fish meal shows up in your omega-3, vitamin D and salt totals without a second thought.