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‘Choose a large fish such as sea bass, bream or John Dory. Clean and wash it. Leave the head on but remove the eyes. Rub all over with salt, pepper and olive oil, and bake in an oiled baking dish (45 minutes for a 1–1½ kg (2–3 lb) fish at gas 3, 160°C/325°F) or wrapped in foil (an hour at gas 4, 180°C/350°F).

‘Serve the fish on a large dish on a bed or parsley or lettuce. Decorate it with lemon slices, sliced green pickles, black olives, radishes, fried pine nuts or almonds, and pieces of pimento. Make an oriental design, for example a criss-cross pattern. Serve cold, accompanied by bowls of tarator sauce’, see p. 45.

‘A delightful version of this dish is boned fish tarator. Prepare the fish and bake it in foil. Allow to cool. Cut off the head and tail neatly and set aside.

‘Skin the body of the fish and bone the flesh. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Place the boned fish on a large serving dish, patting it back into its original shape. Place the head and tail at each end and mask the whole body of the fish with tarator sauce.

‘Serve decorated with whole pine nuts or almonds, lightly fried, pickles, olives, and whatever else you like.

‘This method of boning and reassembling the fish is particularly useful if dealing with a very large fish that does not fit into the oven. It can be cut into manageable pieces instead, and then baked in foil as usual.’

† SEA BREAM & PORGY

Sparidae spp.

The French have daurade or dorade, pageau, pagre and denté. The Spaniards besugo and denton. And sometimes you may see the pandora – pageau – imported from Greece under the name of lithrini, which is confusing if you try to look it up in a general cookery book. Undoubtedly, the spread of the sea breams is worldwide. In Japan it is the most prized of holiday fish in the form of the tai or red sea bream. Unfortunately for Pacific-coast Americans, I gather that an inferior species is sometimes sold under the honourable name of tai – a typical trick of the sharp food trade, akin to advertising margarine with pictures of cows knee-deep in summer meadows.

In one form and another sea bream swim up and down the American Atlantic coast under the cheerful names of porgy and, occasionally, scup. Both come from the same Narragansett Indian word, mishcuppauog, the plural of mishcupp which means thick-scaled, something you will understand if you have ever prepared a sea bream yourself. A compiler of a mid-nineteenth century dictionary of Americanisms was quite taken with the odd humour of the thing: ‘It is singular that one half the original name, scup, should be retained for this fish in Rhode Island, and the other half, paug, changed into paugi or porgy, in New York.’ Another member of the family is the sheepshead. It has a mild sort of look, but – for a fish – very strong teeth a bit like a sheep’s incisors, and it crunches up the barnacles and crustaceans that it likes to eat. It is a good fish for poaching. In Louisiana they serve it with a creamy egg sauce. You might try it, too, with one of the hot sea-urchin sauces on p. 482, or something similar flavoured with the coral of scallops.

To the British the idea of porgy is familiar but mysterious. They know the cheerful ballad that begins:

My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light,

Who slept with a mermaid one fine night,

And of that union there came three –

A porpoise, a porgy and the other was me.

You may recall that the porgy ended up in a chafing dish, presumably being pan-fried, which is the best fate for this kind of fish when it comes in small sizes. Try the American style of dipping the fish in egg beaten with twice its volume of milk, then roll them in a mixture of equal quantities of cornmeal, flour and cornflour. Pan-fry them in oil or bacon fat and serve them with lemon and parsley.

What I cannot recommend is the false sea bream displayed on some fish counters. A confident ticket is stuck usually into large fillets 30 cm (1 foot) long displaying a skin of