Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [243]
That, I reckon, makes sillock a version of Bombay duck which, as anyone who had ever listened to a radio quiz will know, is not a feathered friend but a fish, Harpodon nehereus. They catch it in such quantities on the west coast of India that over three-quarters of the haul is split, boned and sunburned dry on racks on the beach. The smell, as Tom Stobart recalls in The Cook’s Encyclopaedia, is ‘like a fish-glue factory in full spate. It blows through the fishing villages of the Bombay coast: you can smell it on the breeze amongst the coconut palms or across the black mud of mangrove-bordered creeks. And this picturesque smell invades the kitchens of curry addicts the world over because Bombay duck is not only eaten around Bombay but is exported.’
The addict of Indian food knows that cooking transforms the oddity of smell into the most delightful piquancy. There is no reason not to use it in Western cooking – one suggestion is to break it up and cook it briefly in butter before you pour the whole thing, foaming, over fish cooked in the meunière style. Here, though, is a recipe from Harvey Day’s Complete Book of Curries, which gives you the Indian style:
BOMBAY DUCK AND BRINJAL CURRY (Boomla begga ka salna)
Brinjal is the Indian name for aubergine. Boomla, meaning Bombay duck, is sometimes anglicized as bummelow.
Serves 2
1 large aubergine
1 large onion, sliced thin
mustard or sunflower oil
4 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 teaspoon ground coriander seed
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cayenne or chilli pepper
12 pieces Bombay duck
2 tablespoons dessicated coconut
juice of 1 lemon
Cut the aubergine in half lengthways, then across into 2-cm (¾-inch) slices. Fry the onion in 3 tablespoons of the oil until it is well browned. Keep stirring. Add the garlic, spices, salt and pepper and cook gently for 5 minutes. Put in the aubergine with 300 ml (10 fl oz) water. Simmer until cooked. Cut the pieces of Bombay duck into four each and add them to the pan, with the coconut. Pour on the lemon juice and give everything another 5 minutes before serving, with rice.
This idea of dried fish as a relish to the stolid realities of every day eating links those school-bairns of the Shetlands more closely with fishermen of the Bombay coast than with us today. Today our food is almost all relish. The habit of using small, sharp flavours to get down bowlfuls of rice or manioc or pasta is quite alien to us – how odd an Italian peasant would find Alice Waters’ instructions, in her book of pasta, to provide roughly as much sauce or embellishment as pasta itself.
We have lost, or are losing, the dried fish of Scotland and Shetland. What a pity they cannot be kept in our sights as bokkem are in South Africa. They are made from mullet (hoarder), horse mackerel (maasbanker), bass (steenbrass) and shad (elf) in the same sort of way as blawns. First the salting, then a day in the sun and up to a week in the cool of shadowy verandahs. The idea came from the Netherlands. They can be chewed as a relish and are said to taste like biltong. Or they can be lightly grilled and eaten with butter – and a glass of white wine.
I regret that refrigeration has driven out many old curing methods, unreliable as they must often have been. After all a frozen herring is similar, if inferior, to a fresh herring, whereas a kipper or a buckling or a wind-dried is something quite different to eat. The old methods increased variety: freezing does not – the only certainty is that it diminished flavour. One has to apologize for a frozen herring, for a kipper never.
The advantages of refrigeration are all in distribution. I do not belittle this. In the old days, many people starved to death as they do today in Africa. Now in Europe and North America, they don’t. Food can be kept over the winter, or bought