comfort food
This week's catch were Black Back flounders. I picked up four of them from the back of a truck in Harvard Square, brought them home, beheaded and gutted them, then cooked two of them in a steel pan with a thin layer of salt and a squeeze of lemon. silentq had signed us up for a CSF back in March. It was an interesting notion -- like farm shares, but with the daily catches off a boat from Gloucester. You never knew from week to week what sort of fish would come in, and would have to adapt according to what the boats would deliver. One week it might be two pounds of hake, the next a half dozen flounders. We've been getting a lot of whole flounder. We alternated between whole fish and fillets, not fully realizing at the time that signing up for whole fish also meant that you had to scale and clean them yourselves.
At first, I, like many other yuppie urbanites disconnected from the processing of the animals that they fed on, was a bit squeamish about the gutting part. My books1 had clear instructions about how to prep whole flatfish -- cut off the head with a sharp knife and the guts should just pour out. Except they don't. The flounder is an ugly little fish, squashed and asymmetrical, and it doesn't invite you into caressing it. While slicing the head off was easy, the organs had to be scraped out. I did it with a spoon, an instrument that I held at the longest possible extension. It was as if I was afraid that rupturing a fish's stomach would make it explode and taint me with some kind of Lovecraftian slime.
Eventually, with practice, I got used to it, and last night I was just digging in with my fingers, tugging at connective tissue to tear out kidneys and digestive tracts. The guts were cold like the sea. There was something satisfying about it; that made me wonder how many other generations in my family had done the same thing. My mother's family were mostly farmers and as far as we know my father's family were always townsfolk, yet growing up on an island, it was more or less a given that you ate fish on a regular basis. Even now, I think of beef and turkey as Western things, as things that I have learned to eat as I grew up; but fish and pork was my heritage. Even now, picking at the bones of a fish carcass evokes comfort memories that I imagine meatloaf does for some of my friends.
Our run on the fish share expires next week. I don't think we're going to resubscribe, but I'd like to do it again someday.
1a few years ago, while in New York for work, I spent an evening at OlderSister's apartment, brainstorming food ideas for our second Canadian Expat Thanksgiving, and she introduced me to the encyclopedic wonder that is Alan Davidson's North Atlantic Seafood. I've since acquired my own copy, and if anything, the fish share has been a great prompt for putting that book to work.
At first, I, like many other yuppie urbanites disconnected from the processing of the animals that they fed on, was a bit squeamish about the gutting part. My books1 had clear instructions about how to prep whole flatfish -- cut off the head with a sharp knife and the guts should just pour out. Except they don't. The flounder is an ugly little fish, squashed and asymmetrical, and it doesn't invite you into caressing it. While slicing the head off was easy, the organs had to be scraped out. I did it with a spoon, an instrument that I held at the longest possible extension. It was as if I was afraid that rupturing a fish's stomach would make it explode and taint me with some kind of Lovecraftian slime.
Eventually, with practice, I got used to it, and last night I was just digging in with my fingers, tugging at connective tissue to tear out kidneys and digestive tracts. The guts were cold like the sea. There was something satisfying about it; that made me wonder how many other generations in my family had done the same thing. My mother's family were mostly farmers and as far as we know my father's family were always townsfolk, yet growing up on an island, it was more or less a given that you ate fish on a regular basis. Even now, I think of beef and turkey as Western things, as things that I have learned to eat as I grew up; but fish and pork was my heritage. Even now, picking at the bones of a fish carcass evokes comfort memories that I imagine meatloaf does for some of my friends.
Our run on the fish share expires next week. I don't think we're going to resubscribe, but I'd like to do it again someday.
1a few years ago, while in New York for work, I spent an evening at OlderSister's apartment, brainstorming food ideas for our second Canadian Expat Thanksgiving, and she introduced me to the encyclopedic wonder that is Alan Davidson's North Atlantic Seafood. I've since acquired my own copy, and if anything, the fish share has been a great prompt for putting that book to work.