Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [84]
The strange things is that after that glamorous occasion, it makes no appearance in cookery books, as far as I can discover, until the nineteenth century. No recipes, no comment. Perhaps it was all too commonly served up dry and overcooked. Everyone knew what to do with it, and did it without enthusiasm.
Halibut’s one moment of glory, gastronomic glory, occurs on 25 April 1784, at Olney, when the poet William Cowper turned his skill To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut on which I dined this day. Mind you, Cowper was using the halibut to send up the dull stupidity – he was ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage’ – of the notable Dr Blair, an Edinburgh academic who fancied himself on poetry. Blair was all for Ossian and his wild Scottish fake romanticism. He ticked Virgil off for not sticking to things that ‘fill the nation with astonishment’ – e.g. thunderbolts splitting mountains, when writing about a storm in the Georgics, but descending to the obvious such as wind and rain. Cowper could not, he confessed, conceive ‘that wind and rain can be improper in the description of a tempest’. And in returning thanks to the friend who had sent both Blair’s lectures and the halibut, he took off into the Sublime, laughter barely restrained, à la Dr Blair, all preposterous grandeur:
Where hast thou floated, in what seas pursued
Thy pastime? When wast thou an egg new-spawn’d,
Lost in th’ immensity of ocean’s waste?
Roar as they might, the overbearing winds
That rock’d the deep, thy cradle, thou wast safe –
And in thy minikin and embryo state,
Attach’d to the firm leaf of some salt weed,
Didst outlive tempests, such as wrung and rack’d
The joints of many a stout and gallant bark,
And whelm’d them in the unexplor’d abyss.
Indebted to no magnet and no chart,
Nor under guidance of the polar fire,
Thou wast a voyager on many coasts,
Grazing at large in meadows submarine,
Where flat Batavia just emerging peeps
Above the brine, – where Caledonia’s rocks
Beat back the surge, – and where Hibernia shoots
Her wondrous causeway far into the main.
– Wherever thou hast fed, thou little thought’st
And I not more, that I should feed on thee.
Peace therefore, and good health, and much good fish,
To him who sent thee! and success, as oft
As it descends into the billowy gulph,
To the same drag that caught thee! – Fare thee well!
Thy lot thy brethren of the slimy fin
Would envy, could they know that thou wast doom’d
To feed a bard, and to be prais’d in verse.
Apart from that pantomime grandeur, to be recited with gestures I am sure, halibut lies low again until 1826. That year, The Cook and Housewife’s Manual was published under the aegis of Sir Walter Scott, written ostensibly by Meg Dods of the Cleikum Club, but really by a friend, Mrs Johnstone. She remarks that the halibut sometimes usurps the turbot’s name in Scotland – shifty fishmongers? – but that it is excellent in its way, even if not so rich or so well flavoured as the turbot. And she suggests currying it, a brilliant suggestion. She notes that curried fish has lately become popular and is good as long you make up your own blend of spices for each dish, avoiding commercial curry powders. It is rather daunting to think that, 160 years later, cookery writers are still saying the same thing. Are lazy practices eternal?
After Mrs Johnstone, there is another silence,