Imperative cooking: jumping fish
1,44-1*-0
The irritation is not just with the socialist character of restaurants: same size portion for all, regardless of appetite; same chair for all, regardless of bottom size; cooking for the standard customer whose standards are too low. It's not just that restaurants can be such irritating places: the service that pleases on day one niggles by day three. It is the exile from the kitchen. One wants to get at it again.
Picnics are one way. But the usual sort don't provide enough opportunity for Preparation. Packing slices of saucisson in Paper and then unwrapping them again is not that stimulating. Anyway, it does not solve another problem cooks have on holi- day, which is the sight of all those wonder- ful raw ingredients, the fish and the meat, and the inability to do anything with them. Every day starts with a visit to the cafd by the market — in my recent case in Puerto de Santa Maria and the Mercado de la Concepcion — for coffee and a huge slice of tortilla, sometimes with shrimps and added oil. There, you lean against the bar and you can see all those lucky Spanish ladies buying the small soles from Sanlucar, the dorados, swordfish, scabbard fish, Clams, chocos, the sardines, hake and the rest. The tortilla goes bitter with envy. Lucky blighters. I know what they are going to do with those clams. At least I know what I'd do with them. I'd.. . . '
I asked Spectator readers some years ago what could be done about this. Most replies were more imaginative than practical. But one does work. Out of the bar. Into the market. Go on, buy some slices of tuna, about half a pound a person. Then you want five lemons, a large onion, a cucum- ber and a couple of peppers, some parsley
ter already, just choosing and thinking about it all. Then back to the hotel and into the bathroom. A bowl you have with you, you never travel without one, one with a tight-fitting lid. Squeeze the lemons into the bowl; add a handful of salt, the tuna and the finely chopped veg and a few dried chillies you always have in your pocket. Then off to the beach/park/mountain or whatever, buying bread and wine on the way. By lunch-time the fish will be ready.
Each day you can use different fish. Tiny squid are good and scabbard fish is very good. Oddly, swordfish is not very good. The breams are good if they are big enough to fillet. But best by far is the tuna. It is, in fact, better than cooked tuna — slices white with the lemon on the outside and deep red inside. The most amusing fish to do this
way are very small live shrimps, what the Spanish call camerons. They are sold out- side the market in deep boxes, deep because they jump about. But you need tuna or some other sliced fish with them. Otherwise, when you put them in the lemon juice they jump out and all over the hotel bathroom. They can be awkward to retrieve because they are nearly colourless and merge with the marble. A wife is essen- tial in the operation. One of you takes a handful of hoppers, drops them into the bowl with its lemon juice, then the other, quick as a flash, throws a slice of tuna on top before they can jump out. , And the rest of the salt? That is for the one fish worth bringing home to Blighty. Most fish can now be bought here but rarely the best, smallest fresh anchovies. Buy a kilo three days before the return. Drop them through the necks of two litre- and-a-half empty mineral water bottles, funnelling in salt through a rolled Spectator. Store them in the wardrobe, pouring off any water twice a day. Before departing, cut the bottom off one, empty the anchovies into the bathroom basin and then put them into the other bottle whose contents have shrunk with the loss of water. On arrival home, dust off the salt and store them in a large jar covered in olive oil. They will keep for two years.
Digby Anderson
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