Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [260]
Serve with a big bowl of sour cream, another bowl of melted butter, and dishes of black caviare, or red caviare, or homemade ‘caviare’. Smoked salmon, smoked sturgeon, and smoked cod’s roe provide excellent alternatives: so do the Danish pickled herrings on p. 195. Sliced kipper, served raw with lemon juice, makes another good filling.
BOTARGO
Another hard roe luxury. This time provided by the grey mullet, like the true Taramasalata, below. The roes are salted, dried, pressed into black-skinned, orange-brown firmness, a salami firmness; perfectly adapted, unlike caviare, to the hot climate of the Mediterranean, and the exigencies of transport in all weathers. In Italy bottarga or buttariga is served in thin slices with bread, and either olive oil or butter; sometimes with fresh figs, like Parma ham. In southern France poutargue is a speciality of Martigues: it is eaten in thin strips with a seasoning of pepper, olive oil and lemon juice. Sometimes it is added, anchovy style, to salads of haricot beans or chick peas to give them piquancy. It was once a popular import here, in England. On 5 June, 1661, Pepys remarks in his Diary that he and Sir William Penn, father of Pennsylvania Penn, made their way home after a sociable evening with friends. It was so hot that they went out upon the leads in the garden, Sir William in his shirt sleeves. Pepys played his ‘flagilette’ and the two men stayed there ‘talking and singing and drinking of great draughts of Clarret and eating botargo and bread and butter till 12 at night, it being moonshine’. Next day Pepys had a dreadful headache – but not, I think, from Botargo.
It is difficult to find Botargo in England nowadays. The best thing is to look out for it if you are visiting Paris, or the Mediterranean countries, and bring it home as a souvenir. Or you can make it. Claudia Roden, who writes about batarekh from her Egyptian experience, in Middle Eastern Food, gives a couple of recipes. One came from Canada, where in Montreal at least one may buy frozen grey mullet roes. In Britain, fresh cod roes have to do instead.
Make sure, before you buy them, that the skins of the roes are perfectly undamaged. Roll them in kitchen or sea salt, and lay them on a wad of absorbent paper. As the paper becomes damp, put a fresh wad down and turn over and salt the roes again. When the paper is at last dry, after several days, hang the roes up in a good draught (steamy kitchens are to be avoided, as always, for drying food). Leave them for 8 days or so, until they are hard and dry. They can now be eaten, or stored in a refrigerator in tightly-sealed polythene bags. Miss Roden remarks that the drying process can be hurried up by putting the roes into a turned-off warm oven from time to time; leave the door open. The danger is that the botargo may over-dry to crumbliness.
A quicker recipe makes use of smoked cod’s roe. Put it into the oven, when it has been turned off, from time to time, and hang it up in a dry airy place between whiles. This takes only a few days and little effort.
TARAMASALATA
The pride of the Abbazia di Loreto, an eighteenth-century monastery of curves and colour at the back of Vesuvius, is the pharmacy. The original 300 majolica jars stand elegantly on the shelves. Even more elegant is the mortar, placed in the centre of one wall. I suppose that mortars were the main piece of equipment in a pharmacy in those days. This one takes the form of a hollowed out Corinthian capital decorated with gold, and mounted on a waist-high column of pink marble. How much time people had then, how many people were needed about the place, how hard and steadily they worked.
Taramasalata belongs to that