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By Root 1302 0

we ate, head and all, on the Adriatic coast, the barbecued bluefish at the end of a Long Island summer, the little yellow perch we caught at sunset in Vermont and crisply panfried a few moments later. If this is your idea of goodness, too, use your microwave for melted-cheese sandwiches. It does not panfry or deep-fry acceptably or grill or barbecue at all. It hardly roasts or even toasts, and it only sort of bakes. For dishes you expect to be browned, some recipes make you brush the food with soy sauce and paprika or Kitchen Bouquet fluid or, in a stunning number of instances, dehydrated onion soup or dried spaghetti sauce mix. The other recipes try to persuade you not to care.

Buying Fish

• Fish should never smell fishy. The skin and gills should smell like fresh seaweed. As time passes, the seaweed smell disappears, then a sour odor develops, followed by the stench of ammonia or sulfur.

• The skin should look lively and iridescent, and the slime (or mucus) should be transparent and bright. As time takes its toll, both slime and skin become less lustrous; finally the mucus grows milky and opaque and the skin’s pigmentation becomes dull and, at its worst, mottled and off-color.

• In most species, the eyes should be convex and bulging, with transparent corneas and bright black pupils. Then the cornea changes to opalescent and finally to milky; the pupils become dull black and then gray; and the eyes become slightly sunken, then flat, and finally concave in their center.

• The gills should be brightly colored with no trace of mucus. (Lift the stiff gill cover to see the gills.) As the days draw on, the gills become dull, then discolored and yellowish; clear mucus appears, then becomes opaque and milky.

• The body should feel firm, elastic, and smooth, bouncing back when you press it. As the flesh grows increasingly soft, the scales detach more easily from the skin and the surface becomes wrinkled. Inside, the color along the backbone changes from neutral to slightly pink, then full pink, and finally to red.

Incidentally, the best way to store a whole fish is by keeping it under slowly melting ice, not on top of it (as many reputable fish markets do, though it’s next to useless). The melting ice keeps the entire fish at 32° F. and helps wash away bacteria.

The one kind of cooking a microwave oven does, and often does quite well, is boiling and its cousins—steaming, poaching, braising, and stewing—and most microwave fish recipes use one of these techniques. So I chose what looked like the best recipes from the best cookbooks in my microwave library and went to work.

The truite au bleu did not turn blue and was watery and dull. Bluefish with fresh fennel worked better, if you like steamed bluefish. Fillet of sole amandine was tasteless, decomposed, and swimming in broth, and the almonds had not browned. Whiting en colère (biting its own tail) was delicate and moist itself, although the cream sauce never thickened and the parsley was overdone. Swordfish, dry and mushy, lacked taste and, though cooked without liquid, was surrounded by a pool of pungent fish broth; apparently, the flavor of the fish ended up in the dish. Whole trout with lemon butter was quite good but unevenly cooked. Paupiettes of sole and salmon were gray, rubbery, dry, and almost tasteless, the very defects the recipe had railed against in oven-baked paupiettes; possibly I had the timing wrong, but I do not like paupiettes enough to give it a second try. Medallions of salmon were firm and tasty, but much of the taste came from the marinade of mustard, olive oil, and lemon, which was so good that, having grown weary of steamed fish, I broke the rules and grilled a salmon steak smeared with the marinade in my powerful salamander broiler. The results, I regret, were wonderful, better than anything my microwave had produced.

Step Five: The making of a microwave chef. The Wall Street Journal reports that 40 percent of the efforts of this country’s largest food and flavor company will be devoted in 1988 to making microwavable convenience foods taste