Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [195]
That was an unfair representative of the squid which do, in fact, flourish sweetly and tenderly quite far north in Atlantic and Pacific waters. I don’t understand why they aren’t a regular part of our diet, but until recently they seem to have been regarded only as bait for other fish. The fact that squid are now seen more and more is mainly thanks to foreigners, at least in Britain, and to such popularizers as Isaac Cronin in the States who has fished squid in the Monterey Bay and written a book about it, The International Squid Book. He notes that the first American squid festival took place the year before in Santa Cruz. The species that he mainly writes about is Loligo opalescens, which is similar to Loligo pealei eaten on the East Coast, and to the two species favoured in the Mediterranean and northern Europe. What we do not have in Europe, it seems, is the Grande Calamari of Mexican waters, that is tenderized before sale and sold in flat fillets or steaks.
Mr Cronin wisely points out that ‘squid protein becomes firm rapidly and then turns chewy until long cooking breaks down the muscle. Much of the squid’s reputation as a tough food comes from lack of knowledge of this simple fact. Sautés should be cooked no longer than three minutes and stews no less than twenty minutes.’
This is an opinion I respect, but I am not totally convinced. Those squid rings that form part of the Greek meze, for instance: they are best regarded as a form of marine chewing gum, to be nibbled at steadily while the flavour lasts, then to be politely discarded rather than swallowed. For this reason I never fry squid rings at home, only the youngest, tenderest squid.
At their best, nothing in the vast trawl of fish from the sea can compare with the cephalopods – squid, cuttlefish and octopus – for the combination of sweetness and delicate bite. Nothing else has their power to colour a dish all the deepening shades of brown to sepia – from the Greek name for cuttlefish, that once was the sole source of that colour from its abundant ink. A sepia that seems at times black in its velvety depths. I much enjoy dishes that exploit this romantic quality. It reminds me of licking the paintbrush when I was a child, though mostly its light flat taste is obscured by other items in the dish. In the case of squid, this scholarly note is taken further by the transparent piece of plastic, a rudimentary shell, in the mantle or body sack that is just the shape of an old-fashioned pen nib.
Squid seems to be a variant of the word squirt, from the cephalopod habit of blasting out a cloud of ink to discourage its predators. People used to think this was purely a smokescreen behind which the poor creature might make a retreat. Now they say that the idea is to foil the attacker into thinking that the ink itself is the prey. Presumably it then wears itself out stupidly gnashing and lungeing at an incorporeal darkness that is only a semblance of the creature. This is a psychological nicety which, although it has led to an admiration of cephalopods as the intellectuals of the sea, Mensa level, Oxbridge and Ivy League, need not, I think, detain the cook.
What is more interesting from the culinary standpoint is the bodily form of the squid, which provides a convenient bag for a stuffing. The cuttlefish derives its name from this – like cod, and, more understandably codpiece, it comes from the Norse kaute, meaning a bag. This, however, is no good to the cook since the bag must be slit to free it from the chalky oval that takes the place of the transparent pen of the squid;