Something fishy here in the Herault and I don’t mean the smell form a week’s accumulation of garbage as the refuse collectors join the anti-retirement reform movement. I’m talking about real fish and it’s real fishy.
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| Just a few of the fish available in a French market |
Since college cooking has been my way of relaxing at the end of the day. Over time I’ve accumulated a good sized collection of cookbooks. These cookbooks are by the stars of chef-dom, Pepin, Puck, Child, Hazan and the like. But I’ve come to I realize that these tomes are just fairy tale storybooks. This may be a hard to swallow for Rachel Ray’s viewers but it’s true.
This hit me like a lead sinker when I started trying to buy fish at the local fishmongers. While my cookbooks contained dozens of recipes for salmon and sole, shrimp and crab, here in rural France I’m encountering fish capelan, sar noir, merlu, gobie, dorade, dorade royal, baudroie, lotte, rouget, polpi, raie, anchovies, sardines and cornets.
And these are not exotic fish but the everyday fish that dominate the local fish stands and that home cooks and restaurant chefs seem to buy and cook very well. But I’ve never seen them before and for all my cookbooks I’m at a loss to know what to do.
And I’m not happy about it.
When we lived in in Gig Harbor outside Seattle the town called itself a “maritime city.” Considering it was surrounded by Puget Sound and the Pacific you’d have thought we’d have had tons of fish in our markets. But hell, while we had our fishing fleet we didn’t have a single fish stand. The boats went up to Alaska fish each summer caught tons of fish but not an ounce made it to the Harbor. Adding insult to injury most of the salmon you could buy came from the Atlantic. What was up with that?? Throw in farm raised fish from Southeast Asia or the Mexican catch and the Pacific Northwest looks like a fish wasteland. Talk buying cheap products from overseas.
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| Sea urchins and more |
What was craziest was that my cookbook never mentioned any the fish I see every day in the markets. I’m sure that a few of the star chefs and food writer’s must have seen these fish and been curious about them. But you wouldn’t know it from the cookbooks. I can’t explain these omissions except to think that offering recipes for fish you can’t buy in America may not be a good marketing strategy.
But you know America once had abundant supplies and a wider variety of fresh fish. I know because I grew up in the Bronx and in the 1950s my grandmother would buy live carp for making gefilte fish. She’d toss them in her bathtub until she was ready to make them into delicate yummy fish patties. As a kid I remember being fascinated by the carp as I'd watch them swimming in her fifth floor bathtub.
Today in the States you don’t see live fish or even whole fish, just slabs of white or red meat that taste about as good as cardboard.
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| The sign reads "None of the fish at this stand is farm raised." |
And making it worse is that not only is diversity gone but the big fish--salmon, cod, halibut, crab and tuna--the ones we eat, are at the top of the food chain eating up the diversity. They consume lots of smaller fish, and they’ll even eat each other. In every bite of salmon you are eating pounds of other fish. The little fish in the French markets are lower down on the food chain and learning to eat fish like lotte (monkfish) and dorade (John Dory) doesn’t just widen my choices but it’s makes it easier on the marine environment.
So I’m tossing out my old cookbooks and giving up on these tired food writers who can’t see beyond a salmon mouse. All they’ve accomplished has been the numbing down of our pallets.
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| This is the uncollected garbage and its smelling pretty bad |
Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer
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