Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [47]
Surround the cod with sprigs of parsley and boiled potatoes. Serve with the two jugs of sauce and melted butter.
VERY FRESH COD NORWEGIAN STYLE
A fish straight from the tank should be cleaned – preserve liver and roe – and cut in ‘finger-thick slices’. Keep the head. Put all the fish into a bowl under a running tap until about 30 minutes before the meal, then drain.
Boil water with salt, as above, in a fish kettle. Lower the fish on the strainer tray, then remove the kettle from the heat when water returns to the boil. The slices will be almost cooked. Give them a minute or two more if necessary; the head will not need much longer.
Meanwhile, simmer any roe in salted water separately, tied in muslin, until just firm, about 10 minutes, then serve in slices with the cod. The liver should be chopped and cooked in the minimum of barely salted water with a splash of vinegar: this makes one sauce. Provide another such as hollandaise * or, in nineteenth-century style, an oyster sauce (p. 263). And boiled potatoes. Tuck bunches of parsley around the cod’s head, slices and roe.
CRAB STICKS ALIAS POLLOCK (OR CROAKER)
The crab stick or, in some circles, krab stik – is a phenomenon of ‘high tech’. A fairly recent phenomenon. A fishmonger in Cirencester market gave us a couple free in, I would say, 1983 when they were new on the British scene. Looking first at their rouged cheeks, and then pushing the thready synthetic sweetness round our mouths, we never thought they would come to anything. If someone had told us that a vast industry in Japan is devoted to such things, we would not have believed them. Yet now crab sticks lurk in the corner of every fishmonger’s slab.
I would say that they are spurned by the knowing customer here. Certainly it never occurred to me that crab sticks would appear in the revision of Fish Cookery until a trip to Paris in 1986. Three of us were taken by SPOEXA to the great food fair that is held there every other year. One evening we went to an elegant restaurant, the Quai des Ormes: among the dishes ordered was pasta with crab sauce. When it came, we were startled to see that the final flourish was an artistically squashed crab stick. Three days later, when I was with friends in Aix en Provence, the cook of the family came home from market with a new treasure. Just the thing, the fishmonger had assured her, for a nice crab salad, little batons of claw meat.
When I said, ‘Ah, crab sticks!’, she was mortified. Next day, we paid the fishmonger a visit. He swore they were the real thing – look at the fibres, Mesdames, and the colour that you always find on crab close to the shell. Obviously he believed himself. His sincerity was touching. It made us very nervous. Nothing is more impermeable than a gastronomically sincere French fishmonger – except perhaps a gastronomically sincere French chef. The implications are daunting. Watch out when you next go to France. Be wary of crab on the menu.
If crab sticks are not crab, what are they? That, as I discovered from a seafood quarterly, Ocean Leader, published in Seattle, is more interesting than you might suppose, and far more ancient.
The idea goes back a thousand years, to ingenious Japanese fishermen who for one or another reason were too far from home to get back and sell their catch in time. To save what they could, they boned and chopped the fish to a jellied hash that they called surimi. This was mixed with something starchy and salt, and cooked. The resulting paste was then moulded round bamboo sticks (chiku) in rings (wa), for later sale. This faceless edible surimi is a kind of marine tofu. It can be made from many fish, though nowadays it comes mainly from the vast catches of Alaskan pollock (and croaker) in the Bering Sea.
The Japanese used knives, pestles and mortar – until machines came along to take over. The processing of surimi is similar to the production of comminuted meat (i.e. meat, bones, gristle, etc. which are pulverized to a paste), the glue and ‘meat content’ of hot dogs, sausages, the more ineffectual pâtés. Surimi