Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [48]
There it is. Now you know.
What irritates me is that this kind of thing can be pleasant enough to eat. From surimi, the Japanese have developed a kind of fish cake, flavoured with mirin, salt and sugar, called kamaboko; it comes in various cylindrical and semi-cylindrical forms, sometimes coloured red on the outside, or cut to show a red spiral design. In a Vietnamese restaurant, you may get prawn paste pressed round a short piece of sugar cane, rather in the style of that ancient chikuwa, that is really good. It seems that once big food business lays its high-tech hands on processing, all virtue, all art goes. Theoretically, artificial flavouring and textures could surely be as fine and lively in their own way as natural ones. Why should an artificial flavouring not be up to the standard, say, of the best perfumes from France?
With the size of the potential market, the expense of employing good tasters and sniffers would be nothing by comparison with the other costs. But then big food business is bent on selling the most tawdry product it can get away with at the highest price the public (i.e. the fools) will pay: ‘With the right dye, flavoring and processing technology, surimi can be made into just about anything. The best profit margins, though, come from imitating shellfish – generally regarded by consumers as luxuries… high tech will never replace the real thing’ – ah, but will it drive it out? Think of the effect frozen chicken has had on the availability of decent poultry – ‘but more importantly it represents a whole new market for the consumer who can’t tell, or afford, the difference. In the United States, where processed food is king, that’s just about everybody.’
That is why the respectable if humdrum pollock and croaker are being turned into crabless crab. It is so easy. Easy for the manufacturer. Easy for his accountants to rake in the cash. Easy for the fool of a consumer to unwrap a packet and serve up with loveless love, and a glass of milkless milk.
STOCKFISH, SALT COD OR KLIPFISH, AND LUTEFISK
HOW TO PREPARE IT
STOCKFISH This is the oldest form of preserved cod and its relations, being air-dried, without salt. The fish are beheaded, slit and gutted, then hung up in pairs, in the dry cold air of Norwegian winters, on wooden tenters like the framework of some ancient Viking homestead. The fish lose about four-fifths of their weight by evaporation, but none of their nutritional advantages. Only water has gone. The main European market is Italy where stoccafisso is even more popular than baccalà (salt cod). Nigeria and Cameroon are big buyers, too, of this useful storage item that requires no refrigeration. Humidity rather than heat is what spoils it.
All you need do is soak it for about thirty-six hours. It can then be used interchangeably with salt cod, though obviously you will need to add salt to the recipe.
SALT COD OR KLIPFISH This came up as a rival to stockfish in the seventeenth century as far as Norwegian exports are concerned. As a product, it had been around much earlier. One English writer recorded in 1555 that Cabot himself had named Newfoundland and the country Baccallaos, ‘because that in the seas thereabouts he found so great multitudes of certain big fishes… which the inhabitants call Baccallaos’. How this ties in with the Spaniards, I do not know, since it