You may think I have a chip on the shoulder when consider you my fish cooking practices.
Cooking fish requires a nice touch with the pan. Or you may finish floundering and getting into deep water.
Some people prefer flathead. If your fish hasn’t a flat head, sit on it for half an hour and then scale.
Scale anything you like—the sideboard, the sink, but you’ll find that cooking fish will send you up the wall anyway. It does me.
I have enormous trouble with batter. Recently one of my friends made a beautiful crisp batter. We all stood around admiring it as it came out of the pan. Then he began this dreadful weeping. He’d forgotten to put the fish in. Batter can become an obsession until people go crazy and are had up for salt and battery,
Filleting fish also needs care. Recently one of my friends filleted too enthusiastically and things rather got out of hand. Well it certainly gave a new twist to fish fingers.
Some people are keen about cooking tommy ruffs and rolling them in flour. You can roll in it yourself if you become excited. Whether you fry or bake your floury fish as the poet says, full many a flour is born to blush unsteamed.
How about cooking carp? Too many cooks keep putting the carp before the course.
You would be better with salmon trout which is a petite, fish, going around in schools: and when the schools are on vacation, they go it alone.
Some cooks sneer at salmon trout and shift their cookery books to the other side of the room. They want to play around with a baked snapper with lemons in its mouth.
But I know, confidentially, that snappers hate lemons and hate even more being a table centre-piece.
Snappers belong to the deep reaches of the sea, exerting their tremendous muscles against the tide, sliding down the liquid banisters of Backstairs Passage and all that.
Remember that, next time you have baked snapper. How would you like to lie around with a lemon in your mouth?
The butcher has offered me a job doing it in his window on Saturday mornings with the notice “Country Pork.” But of course this is getting away from fish.
Fish patties are pleasant. It’s their very anonymity that I find beguiling. Are they salmon, are they tuna or a bit of sunken schooner?
Of course you must have a sauce with some fish. Have your fish swimming in sauce. I like nothing better than paddling up a fish mornay and exploring its sauce.
Well, I’m a mad romantic that’s all.
We haven’t looked at whiting and why should we? Our fish merchant charges me entertainment tax just to peer at them in the shop window.
Some people like squid and it is very nicely done, Continental style. Squid pro quo, of course.
Sardines rate a mention. It’s usually what I finish up having.
As the saying goes, in fish cuisine be sure your tins will find you out!