by Tom Stobart
All fish, no matter how strangely shaped, share the same basic anatomy. Knowing this can be a help when you have to deal with a fish that you have never seen before.
Skin may be smooth, soft and scaleless, in which case it can be left as it is and cooked without problems, or it may be rough like a dogfish’s or covered with scales overlapping like tiles on a roof. Dogfish or skate (see sharks) may be skinned or alternatively blanched in boiling water and then rubbed with a cloth to remove the roughness. Remove scales from other fish by scraping them against their grain, from tail to head, unless they are so firmly fixed that you can only start by scraping off a few at the front and gradually working backward, taking off a strip at a time, as too vigorous scraping from the tail may just tear the skin. In the stubbornest cases, quickly dunking the fish into boiling water will loosen the scales.
Head and gills are usually removed and are either given to the cat or used for soup or stock. They are sometimes left on for the sake of appearance when the whole fish is served, and discarded at table. With a few fish, the head is a delicacy, as, for instance, is that of some large species of sturgeon, which are supposed to have seven different types of meat in the head to be picked out by aficionados. In Norway, whole, gutted cod with the head left on is steamed with the tongue (like sheep’s eyes in Arab countries) offered to the guest as a delicacy. Large cod have ‘cheeks’ which can be cut out and are sometimes sold by fishmongers or retained by the filleters as ‘fry’.
Fins. There are two paired sets, pectoral (front) and pelvic (back).These fins are anchored to structures of bones which are rarely extensive and can usually be taken out with little difficulty. In many fish, the pectoral fins and their associated bones are situated so far forward that they can be removed with the head and gills in one cut. The single fins along the back and the underside (the dorsal and ventral fins – which may sometimes be reduced to no more than spines) can often be removed by cutting down on either side to free them and then pulling them out.
Bones. In some fish, the spine and bones present few problems. The spine has ‘ribs’ which lie in the wall of the gut cavity, but there is little else to worry about. With such fish (most catfish, for instance), the bones are easy to remove. However, other fish have a second set of bones extending from the spine at each side, above the ‘ribs’. These are a particular nuisance, as they may be cut through in filleting and left embedded in the flesh. Many fish go even further and have intermuscular bones between the muscles. Really bony fish like these are best used for soup. Another solution is to pickle them in vinegar, which will soften small bones to the point where they will not be noticed within a day or so.
Gutting. The simplest method is to put the point of the kitchen scissors into the vent and to snip forward as far as the gills, opening the body cavity along the belly. With some fish it is then enough to cut through the spine behind the head and to pull the head forward and downwards, which will also bring the bony pectoral girdle and the gills away together, followed by the guts. With small fish, such as anchovies, all you have to do is pinch through the spine behind the head and pull.
Among the guts can be recognized the two roes (male roe or milt is soft and female is hard with eggs) and the liver. In a few fish, such as skate, the liver is a delicacy. The swim bladder, a shiny, elongated sausage shape which lies just under the backbone, is the source of *isinglass. Sharks and rays do not have a swim bladder and sink if they stop swimming. The rest of the gut is normally thrown away, although the Chinese dry and eat the stomach of the shark. Perhaps this is the point at which to mention that although roes and livers are sometimes delicacies, they may be poisonous in some otherwise edible fish (deadly in the case of the puffer fish and definitely harmful in others), so these parts of unfamiliar fish should not be eaten.
If fish have to be washed, they are best washed quickly just before they are cooked, and they should never be put into water unless this is necessary to soak out blood.
Filleting. It is difficult to learn how to fillet fish from a book and much better to watch someone doing it. Because fish vary enormously, the best technique for filleting one species does not necessarily work for another. Fish with many intermuscular bones should rarely be filleted, as this might lead the unsuspecting diner to think that the fish is boneless when it is not. Few things are worse to eat than fillets with bones in them, especially if these are well concealed by a sauce. Short of getting your fingers into the dish and feeling, like a surgeon, there is no possible remedy.
In the absence of precise instructions, use the following general method for filleting. First cut diagonally behind the head and gills, and then down the back beside the dorsal fins. Then following the dorsal spines of the backbone, with the knife always cutting and scraping along the direction of the bones, dissect the flesh away until you reach the vertebral column itself. Next, still moving the flesh away from the bones, separate the flesh from the rib cage and ventral spines until the fillet comes free. After that, the fish is turned over and the method repeated on the other side. In some fish, two fillets are taken from each side; a cut made down to the backbone on each side before filleting is started will simplify the operation. Filleting many fish is quite easy if it is done with a sharp, flexible knife, such as the sort made for the purpose. On fishing trips, we used to fillet perch with a penknife in the boat, and drop the fillets into vinegar and water, so that they were ready to cook for breakfast the moment we landed.
If fish is to be flaked, it is best to cook it first on the bone, as this produces better fish and easier boning.
Cooking. The simplest way to serve fish is raw, as is done in Holland and Indonesia as well as in Japan. It may be ‘cooked’ without heat by salting (as with anchovies), by salting and marinating (as with Scandinavian salt herring) or by simply marinating in lemon juice or lime juice (as with seviche) or in vinegar (as in roll-mops) until the protein coagulates. Fish may be simmered or poached in a court-bouillon, then eaten hot or cold, or they may be steamed, baked, planked or roasted beside the heat of a wood fire (especially trout), or cooked in hot smoke. What is important is that fish should be just cooked and no more. Although there are rough rules for timing – such as 8 minutes steaming for the first 1 cm of thickness and 5 minutes for each additional one (10 minutes for the first ½ in and 6 minutes for each additional ½ in) – the factors involved vary so much that one cannot rely on formulae, and it is best to test the fish frequently as it approaches doneness. You can then snatch it away from the heat at the exact moment that it is ready. For baking in a medium oven of 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4, allow about 5-6 minutes per 1 cm thickness (13-15 minutes per 1 in) and then start to check on progress. When the fish is just coming away from the bone or has become flaky right through, it is done. In general, fish cooked with skin and bones still intact loses less moisture and is therefore more succulent. It is difficult to cook a very large fish to perfection without getting the outside overdone by the time the inside is just right.
Freshness. Skate and sole are exceptions to the rule that fish should be eaten as fresh as possible. Perfectly fresh fish have virtually no fishy smell (though some, like pike, have an odour of their own). The eyes are bright, shiny and transparent, never cloudy. If the mouth is gaping and the gill flaps open, then the fish has just died. Other checks, such as the colour of the gills, do not always work. If scales are being shed, then the fish is probably not quite fresh, but there is enormous variation in the ease with which scales are shed in different species. With many fish, skin colour is an important indication. Signs of staleness are when silveriness fades, iridescent blue or green lights disappear, and black or brown fish turn grey. Sunken eyes or an unpleasant smell mean that when the fish is opened at home, the flesh will look yellow or dull, the guts will have softened, the blood will be thin and watery, and the ‘ribs’ will have started to come loose through the wall of the body cavity. Such fish is not fit for consumption. White fish may not go off as quickly as oily fish, but it can
be equally unpleasant.
Frozen fish. I once attended a lunch organized by some fish freezers in which fish bought from a fishmonger by an independent expert and as fresh as possible was matched against the highest quality frozen fish of the same species. Dishes using both were cooked in identical ways, so that one could be compared with the other. While, ideally, there should have been virtually no difference between fresh and frozen, the general opinion of the guests was that the fresh fish had the better texture, but the frozen fish had the better flavour. Neither would compare with fish landed straight out of the water, but nobody claimed that. Frozen fish is at present only the best possible solution for handling a commodity that is so very perishable. On the old trawlers, the fish, though immediately gutted, were packed down on ice. But even on ice, a week or more’s storage on trawlers fishing in far northern waters left the fish far from fresh when they were landed. Today, most fish is deep-frozen on board ship very shortly after netting. Frozen fish may need to be thawed if it is to be fried, grilled, filleted, rolled or stuffed, but not if it is to be baked, simmered or poached. Thaw it in the refrigerator. This may take 24 hours.
[Fish – French: poisson German: Fisch Italian: pesce Spanish: pez]
FLAGEOLET. A type of *kidney bean, the flageolet is a rather special and expensive French variety of haricot, with a pale green, tender skin and fine flavour. Flageolets are not soaked before cooking and are often cooked in fancier ways than those applied to the average bean, for instance with fresh cream.
[Flageolet – French: flageolet German: Flageolett Italian: fagiolino Spanish: judía verde]
FLAIR FAT. The interior fatty lining of the loin of the pig, also covering the kidneys.
FLAMING. Spirits, unlike wine, can be set alight and used for flaming (although only the very strongest will burn without prior warming). The massive use of spirits in cooking is a modern innovation and, in recipes from the last century, the use of brandy, even as a flavouring, was limited. Cooks relied more on wine, port or madeira, and rum was the most important kitchen spirit. When brandy was added to cakes and batters, it was largely to promote lightness of texture; the volatile alcohol turned to gas and acted as a leavening when heated. In older French cookery books, it is rare to find the word flambé (and the verb flamber usually referred to cingeing the fluff off chickens before roasting).
The question of whether spirits should or should not be ignited is calculated to start an argument. It is claimed that flaming will burn off excess fat or take the raw taste off the spirits. However, the heat generated is mainly above the flame and not under it. Expert opinions vary. In Burgundy, one famous maître cuisinier de France does not flame his coq au vin but sprinkles it with a fine champagne cognac just before the dish is ready; and he does this himself in the kitchen. On the other hand, another Burgundy chef I talked to (a local traditionalist) was quite belligerent in his insistence that spirits must be ignited. Raymond Oliver says that burning spirits is risky as it can make the food bitter. These people have highly refined palates, but I do not agree with the English restaurateur who wrote in The Journal of the International Wine and Food Society that you can leave the brandy out of a coq au vin altogether as nobody will notice the difference.
Certainly it is a new notion that pyromaniac waiters, who are not cooks, should take time off serving to flood the food with alcohol and set fire to it. As a Danish friend said (and he must be right because his many restaurants in Copenhagen have made him wealthy), ‘The customers want to see a show’. He forgets that some of us go to restaurants to eat.
FLATBREAD. The anglicized version of the Norwegian word flatbrød, also called crispbread (knakkebrød.) Many forms of these biscuit-like breads are made in Scandinavia, not necessarily the elegant rectangles we get in packets but also great rough sheets, usually based on rye flour but sometimes mixed with up to three times the weight of wheat flour or potato. One wonders why this type of bread and its many commercial variants should be so popular in slimming diets.
A Flatbread
Mix 500 g (18 oz) rye flour with 1,500 g (3¼ lb) mashed potato or 500 g (18 oz) rye flour with 750 g (26 oz) plain flour and knead into a dough with water. It is usual to incorporate a little fat, salt or sugar, and often some baking powder (or allow a day to stand in a warm place for some fermentation). The dough is rolled out thin and baked to crispness in a slow oven.
FLATFISH (the plaices, soles, halibuts and flounders) are all members of a single zoological order which has one outstanding common denominator: back in their evolutionary past, they elected to lie lazily on their side on the bottom of the sea and wait for their prey to come within range. The heads of the adults have become twisted round so that both eyes are now on the side which is on top, while the side on which they lie has become white. They rely on camouflage and have developed a capacity to change colour to match the seabed on which they lurk. Colour is therefore not a reliable guide to the identification of flatfish. Some flatfish lie on their right side and look left, while others lie on their left side and look right. Although mirror-image fish do turn up very occasionally, the distinction between dextral species, with the eyes on the right, and sinistral (left-looking) species is important in identifying flatfish.
Skates and rays are also white underneath and adapted to lie on the sea bed, but they lie on their belly, not on their side, and are cartilaginous fish related to sharks. Narrow fish of various sorts, such as the John Dory and the pomfret, swim around upright but sometimes get called flatfish and treated as such by the cook.
With the exception of the halibut, which is a powerful swimmer and often pursues its prey, the flatfish are lazy and do not move about very much. Perhaps that is why some, like soles, tend to develop local variations even in quite a small distance. The French say of soles that they differ between Boulogne, Dover and Ostend. From the cook’s point of view, the species vary greatly in quality from Black or Dover sole, which is a gastronomic prince of fishes, to the megrim, which is not. But they all have one feature which makes them acceptable – an easily removed set of bones.
To fillet a flatfish, you merely make a cut along the length of the spine, cutting down to the bone, then, with sweeping strokes of the knife, lift the two fillets. The fish can now be turned over and the other two fillets removed. Flatfish have soft skins and do not need to be scaled, but some, in particular the sole, are usually skinned. If you make a transverse cut through the skin, just short of the tail, and loosen a large enough flap to get a grip on, the skin can be pulled off towards the head. An alternative is to lay the fillets on a board, skin-side down, and to slice the skin off with a very sharp knife.
The naming of the less well-known flatfish is confused, particularly because of the transplantation of names like flounder and sole from Britain, where they have an exact meaning, to other parts of the world, where they do not. This unavoidable process has caused considerable misunderstanding when one country reads another country’s cookery books. The original British fish from which the names have been taken are as follows.
Brill (Scophthalmus rhombus) is a fairly large sinistral flatfish, up to 3-4 kg (6½-9 lb) in weight and distinguished from turbot by both its oval shape and the lack of knobs on its upper side. The flesh is delicate, but more easily broken than that of the turbot, and brill is generally considered inferior to it. Brill are found from the Mediterranean to the east Atlantic, north to Scandinavia.
[Brill – French: barbue German: Kleist, Glattbutt Italian: rombo liscio Spanish: rémol]
Dab (Limanda limanda) are small, lozenge-shaped dextral flatfish, usually not more than 30-38 cm (12-15 in) long. The dab has a rough skin to which its scientific name refers (Latin, lima, file).They occur in north European waters but not in the Mediterranean or in the west Atlantic where there is a related species, the Yellowtail dab (L. ferruginea). As food, they are good rather than exceptional.
[Dab – French: limande German: Kliesche Italian: pianuzza, limanda Spanish: lenguado, platija]
> Flounder. In Britain, a flounder is a species of small dextral flatfish (Platichthys flesus), the next most common after the dab, and is distinguished by a rough patch on its head. It is found in the English Channel, the Mediterranean and Black Seas and on the muddy bottoms of estuaries and creeks. The flesh is also about bottom, as European flatfish go.
In the US, flounder has become the common general term for any flatfish, referring to, among others, Yellowtail dab, Grey sole and fluke, as well as lending its name to the Summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus) and the Blackback or Winter flounder (Pseudopleuronectes americanus).
[Flounder – French: flet German: Flunder Italian: passera pianuzza Spanish: platija]
Halibut (Hippoglossus hippoglossus) is dextral and the largest of the flatfish; it can be over 4.5 m (about 15 ft) long and weigh 600 kg (1320 lb). Small ones are often called chicken halibut. Large ones are naturally sold in cut pieces and not whole. The meat is very white and of good flavour, but inclined to be coarse, dry and lacking in firm consistency. It is more popular in Britain than in France, and fishermen of the two nations have been known to exchange fish at sea. Halibut ranges north from Biscay to Spitzbergen, Iceland and Greenland and west to New England, but is not found in the Mediterranean.
The Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis) is very similar, but the Californian halibut (Paralichthys californicus) is a sinistral fish which belongs to the same family as the brill and the turbot. The Greenland halibut (Reinhardtius hippoglossoides) is a much smaller fish which grows up to only 1 m (39 in) and is also known as the Black halibut in Germany and France.