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fish

Lots of fish

Two fishy events last week. The first was an enlightening visit from a veterinarian, Valentina Tepedino, whose topic was fish quality. We embarked on a pre–prandial nightmare into nematodes and parasites (anisakis), poisons (tetrodoxin) and various aspects of fish fraud. Here is a small fraction of what she talked about.

Fish fraud, she said, is huge in Europe; as much as 80% of the tuna sales in Europe are fraudulent, with lower grade fish (bluefin) being passed off as the more expensive yellowfin or albacore, and it can happen because the fish are not sold whole where the identifying dorsal, pectoral and anal fins cannot be seen.

Likewise there is well documented fraud involving other fish varieties; a farmed fish, Pangasius, a sort of catfish, is often passed off for sole. It’s so cheap to produce that with strategic employment of some equally cheap labour, it can be filleted to resemble sole and sold for many times its market value. Solea senegalensis, a farmed variety from Senegal, is often sold as the much more expensive Dover sole; it takes skill and experience and a close look at the whole fish, skins and gills included, to distinguish one for the other.

Another big fraud is passing farmed fish off for wild. Though there is a popular misconception that all our cod is wild, the Norwegians have in fact developed a highly successful farming industry. Salt cod (bacalau) is popular in markets like Italy, Spain and Portugal, but much of what reaches the market is either farmed or one of many cheap varieties such as pollock and hake that are almost indistinguishable from cod once decapitated, dried and salted.

And there is the fish product known as “surimi” which is pulverised whitefish (often those cheap farmed staples, pollock and hake) coloured with paprika and reformed into imitation crab, lobster, prawns, eels (anguilla). But often only a percentage of this is actually hake or pollock, as it’s often mixed with even cheaper ones.

One key area where it becomes dangerous to substitute one fish for another is in the area of, for example, pufferfish, which can be passed off as monkfish, as the two are nearly indistinguishable when skinned and decapitated. But pufferfish carry the lethal neurotoxin tetrodoxin which can cause death in as little as five minutes, an risk that eaters of Fugu undertake voluntarily, but not something the average monkfish eater would expect. One instance of this kind of fraud in Italy was enough to ban the sale of monkfish without heads, so that consumers can be sure which fish they are buying.

As always it’s a case of buyer beware, and educating yourself about the sometimes huge and complex issues to to with identification, sustainability, aquaculture and fishing methods. Websites such as Sustainable Seafood, Fishonline, the Marine Conservation Society, MareinItaly and Fishbase are good starting points.

So, thus armed, I was interested to see what was on display at Slow Fish in Genova yesterday, a good mid-sized exhibition with lots of tastings and workshops.

One of the most popular points was the enoteca and bistro where you gained admission by buying a cotton nosebag (actually a glass holder, equipped with a wineglass ready to be filled from over a thousand different bottles). There was a selection of food, including oysters and shellfish and other seafood tastings, some pasta dishes, and some local and Presidia products: focaccia, gelato, candied fruit and sugared almonds from Romanengo, and Huehuetenango coffee.

We were excited to experience a rare tasting of the Portonovo Wild Mussels we’d heard so much about – but never seen – during our visit to Le Marche.

Everyone and his (well behaved) dog was there..

Arrivederci Apulia

Sea urchin (“UNI!!” shrieked the sushi-eaters), part of Friday’s lunch.

One of our speakers said he’d prefer to refer to the place we’ve been calling Puglia by its alternate and more ancient name, Apulia. We were rich in speakers this week.

Thursday we kicked off with a talk by eminent enologist Severino Garofano, about viticulture in the Mediterranean, as well as an overview of the Puglian grapes which we’d been encountering in liquid and nascent form all week. Negroamaro, primitivo, aleatico and susumaniello had all figured in our glasses, and we had a few more drops to sample the range of Garofano’s Azienda Monaci, over a lunch at our excellent hotel. It began with a clever little bundle of shellfish and ended with a triumph of torta: a warm, perfectly-sized almond souffle-ish marvel, melting with cream and a flourish of chocolate.

We took a chilly stroll through the vinyards of Tenute Rubino which are interlaced with fields of artichokes; a combination that works for me. The owners wanted us to get a sense of the land our evening wine would come from, and we certainly experienced the salt winds that flavour the grapes.


We travelled to Cisternino, a Slow City, where we enjoyed a meal of meat with our wine, in Rosticceria Antico Borgo Di Menga Piero, a fornello, a butcher shop where you can buy meat by day as in a regular butcher’s, but by night, when you approach the display cases as a steady stream of locals were doing, you choose your cut of meat much as North Americans might do with lobster. The offerings included involtini di trippa soffocati (tripe rolls), capretto (young goat), and costata di asino (donkey in a red sauce).

On Friday, there was another talk on fishing in the region which included discussion of garum, a Roman seasoning which lives on in the Vietnamese fish sauce nuoc mam, yet another food whose sustainability and provenance is under question (covered during the week in the (thanks Ruth) Christian Science Monitor).

We heard a lot about the different nets and traps used to catch seafood, including the technique of octopus-fishing requiring nothing more complicated than a chicken leg and a fishing line. Of course once you have your octopus you have to kill it, and then you have to beat it with a stick in order to tenderise it enough to eat.

We were given the opportunity to taste it raw, an opportunity that I do not think I will need to seek out again. It made me think how nice is octopus simmered in red wine. Or cooked in anything, really. Ditto the cuttlefish.

After lunch we headed out to see where the meal had come from, to the docks at Brindisi. We were on the brink of turning back, as it was windy and it seemed the fishermen may not have gone out, when a boat returned and its cargo was swiftly unloaded for a speedy fish auction.

One last supper – at the stylish Menhir – where we dined on fish of many faces including some local clams with broad beans and orecchiette.

We had some beautiful wines from Candido, including a mind-blowing Aleatico dessert wine. Then, clutching our tums and our lovely Maglio easter eggs, we stumbled off to bed to ready ourselves for the flight back to Milan early the next morning. Enough eight course suppers to fell an ox, more wines than we could count on two hands, and more enlightenment about the variety of local food products in this area than we would have believed possible. Next stop Vinitaly, in Verona this weekend, where we’ll certainly be seeing several of the wine-makers we’ve already encountered on our travels in Le Marche and Puglia.

We Feed The World

I watched We Feed The World the other night and it was more around the troubling subjects this year has been opening up for me. The film’s ironic opening and closing image shows corn cobs and husks being burnt for industrial fuel. Its title comes from the slogan for Pioneer Seeds, which appears to be the Monsanto of Europe. In the film, one of the company’s senior directors took a tour through Romania, observing that the small scale production there was a reminder of how European farming used to look about fifty years ago, and he hoped things would not change too fast there but the big companies are already moving in, and it probably won’t be long before their world changes for the worse. Some of the things that stayed with me from the film:

  • The initial subsidisation of hybrid crops (the example given was eggplant – which looks better but tastes nowhere near as good as traditional eggplants) by the Romanian government so that farmers buy cheap seed, reap the profits, and then the subsidies are removed the next year, leaving the farmers without saved seed from traditional crops, unable to plant the reproductively sterile hybrid seed, and eating into their earnings to buy the more expensive hybrid seed. And thus starts the cycle of uneconomic overproduction that must surely lead to selling out to industrial giants. And doing what after that: working in some peripheral industry for a poor hourly wage?
  • The wholesaling of Brazilian rainforest which is being systematically razed to plant genetically modified soya for European farm animals. The soil is good, but unsuitable for soya so all the nutrients must be brought in to make that happen. And it means that all the efforts to keep GM out of the European food market are in vain because the animals are eating it.
  • Vast areas of southern Spain are covered in warehouses growing the amount of vegetables needed to feed Europe. More monoculture, more hybrids, and lots of impoverished farm workers from Northern Africa, driven out of their homes and livelihoods by— cheap greenhouse vegetables from Europe. A story very much like the one told in Chicken Madness, where African chicken farmers were being driven out of business by cheap frozen chicken from Europe and Brazil.
  • Small scale fisherman are being removed from the equation by the EC which aims to make all fishing industrial-scale. Which means no more fresh fish for the markets, only the product of trawling deeper and deeper and selling anything and everything they can dredge from the ocean because there’s less and less of what we want. Fish that’s been sitting in the hold for a couple of weeks having died on the nets that are in the sea for 10 or 12 hours does not, the film said, compare with fish brought out of the nets by hand after a couple of hours and sold in the market later that same day.
  • The CEO of Nestle is captured giving a chilling talk about water. What he regards as an “extreme position” is that water is required for human life, and should be a human right. But he, his company (which just happens to be the market leader in bottled water) think it should be considered a “foodstuff” and priced and sold accordingly. He also says that we’ve never had it so good; we’re better fed with more money than any time in history. Yes, we agree, looking at his sleek and well-tended self, you probably are. But not so much those Africans living in greenhouse-shantytowns in Spain, or the farmers starving in Brazil and drinking unclean water while locally grown food is exported for animal feed. Or all the farmers and agricultural workers driven out of business, together with all the businesses that used to serve them.
  • Quote from the poultry breeder, whose mass produced chickens were shown from egg to packaging: “All the market’s interested in is the price. Taste is not really a consideration.” Nor are a lot of other things, from the looks of the world we’ve created.

Skate update, and more on poetry reviewing

Since my first triumphant experience with skate wings in black butter, back in April, I tried cooking it again and was appalled by a penetrating ammonia odour coming from the fish. What was going on? Had I added too much vinegar, causing some toxic reaction? Delia mentioned nothing about this possibility in the book I was using for my recipe.

So I did a little further research and here’s what I found. Apparently skate, like shark, can become contaminated by the urea both species carry in their skin. Not all pieces of skate will have this: the ammonia odour comes from poor handling when it’s first caught and processed, and you should be able to smell it in the raw fish. Ideally you should sniff the fish before you buy it – impossible to do through a grocery store’s shrink-wrapped packaging of course. Better to make your purchase through a fishmonger if you can find one; and of course they’ll be least likely to sell you improperly prepared fish, so safer all round. (I guess this would be more of our self-inflicted damage from allowing mass-procurement supermarkets to take over food handling from knowledgeable specialists.) However, if you do find yourself with an ammonia-scented morsel, you can rescue the day by soaking it in lemon-infused water for 30 minutes to remove the smell (and taste). I guess that’s one more reason skate is a sadly neglected fish… but try it anyway.

After discussion about the tone of poetry reviewing in Canada, I came across some interesting reading from the archives of Chicago’s venerable Poetry Magazine where they once had a major fisticuffs over poetry reviewing. Plus ca change..