The File of Fishing for an Answer

Dear Tamar:

I was gifted 10 frozen fish fillets—the kind that's packed in water so the bag is 80% fish, 20% water. They are tasteless. Racking my brains how to make them edible. I have salt-preserved lemons on hand, plenty of garlic, cilantro, tomatoes...if it were decent fish I'd know what to do, but these grey fillets beat me.

-Fishing For An Answer

Dear Fishing For An Answer,

I don’t know enough about my heart’s geography to know its precise coordinates, but there exists a small special place in mine for mediocre ingredients. Certainly, beautiful ingredients have brought me to tears. I wrote about one instance in Feast on Your Life:

The first time we visited Biarritz, Pete lost me in the market. He found me standing in front of the fishmonger, crying at the beauty of a skate wing. I cried again the next time I visited the same market.

I’ve never been so moved by frozen fish fillets—”the kind that’s packed in water so the bag is 80% fish, 20% water.” (That is a perfect description. I know exactly what you mean. I was once given a number of such filets as a gift. We must both examine whom we call friends—or worse: my frozen fish benefactor was my brother!) But I feel kinship with the grey filets, as I do with the sad onions in a cardboard box at the bodega, or a lone, neglected, ancient can of water-packed tuna. It is a tenderness born of the plucking of a different string than whatever the skate wing plucks, but it is just as true.

I can speculate about the reasons: some belief in the intrinsic holiness of all things. (I can’t even throw out a semi-used tissue; a tissue must be thoroughly used before I dispose of it.) Or a love of constraints so pathological that the challenge of a sub-par ingredient is irresistible. Or a compulsive need to help, hiding insecurity about my self-worth. I can come up with more, but I’m boring myself.

The point is that I’ve spent time thinking about and writing recipes for sad ingredients. I run a figurative orphanage-slash-sanatorium for mediocre and unwanted foods, at least in my mind. And in my first book, I published a recipe written after I’d fished for bluefish and brought home a glut—a fact I ignored long enough for the bluefish to become slightly odoriferous. I wrote it in the full faith that the fish hadn’t gone bad, only gotten a bit worse. Here it is:

A very spicy curry for blue (or graying) fish

1 1/2 pounds fish, strong-flavored by design or miscalculation (or just that awful texture you get when fish is frozen in water as per your brilliant description above)

juice of 1 lemon or lime

salt

2 tablespoons peanut or olive oil

6 shallots, or the white parts of 2 leeks, sliced into thin rounds

1-inch piece ginger, finely chopped

1 stalk lemongrass, finely chopped

2 tablespoons combination chopped roasted peppers and spicy fresh chiles

1/2 teaspoon fish sauce

2 teaspoons grated zest

2 whole canned tomatoes, chopped—or 1 big fresh one, now that it’s summer

1 cup fish stock or clam juice

1/2 can coconut milk

1 cup chopped cilantro, mint, basil, or a mixture of all three

Remove skin, if any, from the fish. Cut the fish into pieces about 1-2 inches around. Squeeze lemon or lime juice over them, sprinkle them with salt, mix it through, and let sit until the rest of the stew is done.

Heat a deep sauté pan and add the oil. Add the shallots, ginger, and lemongrass. As soon as they have started to soften, add the peppers, chiles, salt, and fish sauce. Once it’s all soft, but not completely tender, add the lime zest and chopped tomato. Let it cook over low heat until the tomato has collapsed. Add the fish stock and coconut milk. Let it simmer for 5 minutes, then add the fish, lifting it off the plate instead of tipping the plate in. Cook at a bare simmer for 4-5 minutes until the fish is cooked through. Turn off the heat, add the herbs, and serve it over hot white rice.

Over a decade after writing that recipe, I was sent the manuscript of Slow Noodles. I read the book, a beautiful story of survival in the face of the Cambodian genocide, written by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green, in a single sitting. The story itself, of loss and rebuilding, is gripping enough, and I didn’t feel impelled to cook any of the recipes included until I got to one for “Silken Rebellion Fish Fry (or How to Make Your Unfresh Fish Rations Taste Rather Delicious.)” It is a simple recipe—simpler than mine—and it follows the same principles of overpowering unwelcome tastes and textures with stronger ones. It’s the one recipe from the book I was moved to cook immediately, and I did, using the frozen filets my brother had “gifted” me.

Silken Rebellion Fish Fry

(or How to Make Unfresh Fish Taste Rather Delicious)

This is an excellent training dish for a teenage refugee girl who is learning to cook. It is also useful for turning spoiled girls into useful household members, and for transforming spoiled fish into a palatable meal. Finally, it’s a powerful weapon in the arsenal of any resourceful cook faced with a poverty of resources because of its cheap ingredients and big flavors. (Note: This treatment also works well to enliven plain tofu.)

2 pounds old fish (again, I think you can substitute your own problematic fish here.)
too much salt
6 to 8 stalks lemongrass (white part only), minced
8 to 10 cloves garlic, minced
at least 4 Thai red chilies, minced
1 cup neutral oil

Buy the least rotten fish you can find in the communal store or from your neighbor in the market. Grind down a knife edge as sharp as you can get it—the better to chop the tough lemongrass stalks into fine granules. In a bowl, let fish sit for 1 to 2 hours in too much salt, chopped lemongrass, garlic, and a vast quantity of chile. Overdoing it on the salt and chile will make your eyes water and imbue the old fish with a taste of forgetfulness—the idea is for you to forget that this is a very bad fish, indeed. You want to taste salt and chile, not bad fish. In a medium skillet, heat oil over high heat. Turn the heat down and fry the fish slowly, until golden and crisp. Eat it with jasmine rice. If a bad-fish memory reasserts itself, season with more salt and chili as needed.

Dear cook, if you were really fishing, you wouldn’t need a recipe at all—just a hot pan, fat, salt, and a squeeze of lemon. What you are doing is caretaking, conserving, paying attention. All of which are also a kind of prayer—just in this case, a kind that demands chiles, garlic, and a lot of salt.