Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  But in some places, humanity may have started to learn its lesson. In U.S. waters, some cod breeding grounds have been closed to fishing for nearly twenty years. And slowly cod have started trickling back south, down the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and finally within range of Montauk, Long Island. A cod-fishing trip on the Sea Otter costs $140. I reasoned that if the cod really had returned and I could scrape together a decent catch, I could put fish back on my table without taking out another advance on my credit card.

  The Sea Otter was cheaper than the other Montauk boats and it showed—there were no tables, no seats to speak of, just two long, narrow benches girding the cabin. But despite the discomfort and the fact that it was a Wednesday—a day when the usual working-class clientele of a party fishing boat should be otherwise engaged—word had gotten out that “the cod were back,” and the boat was “railed,” that is, so full that the rails were going to be packed shoulder to shoulder when we finally got around to fishing. I settled down on the narrow prisoner’s bench on the boat’s port side and eventually nodded off on the shoulder of a large plumber from Lindenhurst. Two hours later, the engines slowed and the plumber sprang up, leaving my head to slam onto the bench. Zombielike, I put on my rubber coveralls and Glacier Gloves and stumbled out to the rail in the predawn gloaming.

  There, ten miles from Block Island, wedged into a stretch of water that was maybe a single square mile, was the entirety of the Montauk fishing fleet. I knew all the boats from my childhood fishing days: the small black Vivienne, the trim white Montauk, and the massive Viking Starship . It was like a return of old friends. And yet enemies, too. Because when there are this many boats crammed into such a small space of water, one or two boats will often get lucky while the rest will go home fishless.

  But as we got closer to the Viking Starship, I came to see one, two, four, ten rods bent under the weight of serious fish. When I finally got my gob of clams to the bottom, within seconds my rod was bent double. I reeled three cranks, and snap, my line broke when the big cod below made a lunge bottomward. I quickly retied and sent my hook down again. Wham! Another big cod on. This one made it to the surface and into my milk crate. Meanwhile the Lindenhurst plumber to my left already had four codfish. He seemed to have some kind of special method. He would flip out his line at a forty-five-degree angle from the stern of the boat, let it drift around, and then, watching the tip of his pole twitch with the first tastings of a codfish, mutter to himself, “C’mon, you motherfucker. C’mon, you son of a bitch. Take it, you fucker.” And then, rearing back on his heels and setting the hook, his pole bending deeply, he’d exclaim with the full capacity of his lungs, “HAVE A NICE DAY!”

  The “bite” continued all morning, although, thanks to bad technique and faulty equipment, I dropped 75 percent of the fish I hooked. The Lindenhurst plumber meanwhile accrued codfish after codfish. “HAVE A NICE FUCKING DAY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” he screamed again and again, setting the hook on more and more cod—savagely, terribly, with a rising chaos of blood thirst in his voice. I was using a medium-size plastic milk crate to keep my fish, but the plumber had brought along a garbage can four times its size, and it was brimming with the tails of dying fish. “HAVE A NICE DAY, YOU STUPID COCK-SUCKER!” Fish after fish. A second garbage can. The beginning of a third.

  In the course of my twelve hours at sea I caught about a dozen five-to-seven-pound cod, giving me a total take-home “round weight” of about seventy pounds. I paid $140 for the fishing trip, which meant that all of my delicious fresh cod cost only two dollars per pound. A tremendous savings! The only problem is that cod have a low “fillet yield,” meaning that a lot of their body is devoted to their huge heads and not to the pearly white boneless fillets that extends from pectoral to the caudal fin. So I really only had thirty-five pounds of fillets. That meant something like a four-dollar-per-pound cost. In order to bring the price back down again, I would have to resort to more drastic cost-saving measures …

  First, though, I dealt with the fillets. Thirty-five pounds of cod meat will last my family about ten weeks, which means almost all the meat had to be packed for the freezer. If I hadn’t blown my book advance, I might have had the $85.00 to buy a professional vacuum packer. But since I had blown my advance, I did some research and discovered on a fishing Web site a way to vacuum-pack that involved a pot of water ($0) and a box of Ziploc bags ($2.99). Here’s how it’s done: Fill the biggest pot you have with cold water. Put your codfish fillet in a Ziploc bag. Close the bag, leaving just one little dime-width gap open at the corner. Submerse almost the entire bag in the pot, with just the open corner of the Ziploc seal protruding above the surface. The water pressure will force all the air out of the bag, and this is good, since the less air you have touching your cod, the longer your cod will last. If you are a stickler for a tight seal (as I am), you can suck the remaining air out of the corner of the Ziploc seal in one fishy inhale and then pinch the corner closed.

  This is what I did with my thirty-five pounds of cod fillets, and I was happy to see that as I stacked them, layer after layer, like cord-wood, they would exactly fit the lower berth of my freezer. It felt like putting money in a bank account. Even better. For unlike freelance-writing income, which is forever subject to deductions in the form of Social Security tax, tuition, and other nuisances, I had full, inalienable title to my cod. I don’t generally align myself with Libertarians, but just let the government try to take my fish away from me and see what happens.

  With my fillets safely packed up, I turned my attention to my new idea of stretching out my cod-fishing dollar. This idea came to me while I was standing next to the Lindenhurst plumber by a pile of guts at the back of the boat after the mate had filleted our catches. “Hey, you know,” he said, looking around at the carnage, “there’s a lot of good meat on those heads!” Even though the plumber’s remark was more apostrophe than prescription, I followed his suggestion and shoved twenty codfish heads into my cooler.

  With the fillets packed away, I finally got to all that “good meat” on the heads. I found there were two ways of doing this. The less efficient is to take a paring knife and work out the flesh just behind the brain casement as well as the circular scallop-shaped piece of muscle above the gill plate, which opens and closes a codfish’s mouth and gills. This I did with about half the heads, until my wrists started to ache. In all, I was able to dig out a gallon-size Ziploc bag full. This meat I froze for later use as cod cakes, cod chowder, and cod popsicles for my son (just kidding on that last one).

  It was, however, the second use of the head that turned out to the pièce de résistance of codfish penny pinching: cod-head spaghetti sauce.

  Flipping through Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, I found a recipe for fish-head sauce, and I set about following it. I fried some onions and garlic in olive oil in the widest pan I had. When everything goldened up nicely, I laid the cod heads right in the hot oil. I sautéed the heads on one side, flipped them, and sautéed them on the other. I then took them out and let them cool. The big pieces, that “good meat” that’s readily noticeable on the shoulders and gill plates that I would have had to dig out with a paring knife if the heads were raw, slid right out when the heads were cooked. Per Marcella’s advice, I put those big chunks aside for later so they wouldn’t overcook in the main body of the sauce.

  The horror show (and the savings!) is what happened with the rest. After sautéing them, I found that the cod heads became rather gelatinous and everything of integrity in them started to come apart—the lips, the tongue, the brain, even the eyes. This gloppy, bony heap turns out to be the ambrosia of cod-head spaghetti sauce. To make use of it, you remove the bigger bones by hand and then put the remaining mess through a hand-cranked food mill. Out of the other side comes a purplish mass that no one who eats this sauce needs to know about. Combined with already simmered tomatoes, parsley, and white wine, the sauce became savory red and delicious. After I mixed in the big chunks of cheek and
shoulder meat, it was downright hearty.

  The fishing, the head-meat paring, the head frying, the cleanup—it all left me feeling a little like a juiced-out piece of fruit. Indeed, if I were a person accustomed to being paid by the hour, it would be hard to say that there was any real savings in this cod trip. Exhausted, I laid out my spaghetti and fish-head sauce on a massive platter in front of my family. Joining us that night was a sophisticated and well-traveled Washington Post food writer who had been downsized during the Post ’s recent cutbacks. She herself was considering becoming a free-lance writer. My two-year-old son knew nothing of the cheek meat and brain pulp that had gone into the meal, and he tucked in to his bowl of pasta with relish. So as not to disturb his forward progress, I whispered the fish-head spaghetti sauce recipe to the former Washington Post food writer when she asked for it.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “That’s la cucina povera !” The cuisine of the poor.

  Maybe so. Or maybe you could just call it “fruit of the freelancer.”

  “You can stop the pain, Marcel. Just show us how to crust a sea bass.”

  Recipe File

  Southeast Asian Catfish

  Taking on Asian cuisine is always a little daunting at first, but there are usually a few key ingredients that unlock a lot of the mystery. When it comes to Thai and Vietnamese cuisine, the particular taste we associate with it comes mostly from something known in English as fish sauce. Fish sauce is a heavily salted, slightly fermented liquid derived from small fish (often anchovies). In spite of its name, it doesn’t taste fishy. It just tastes, for lack of a better description, Southeast Asiany.

  The great thing about fish sauce is that once you buy a bottle of it, you can keep it around for a year or more. It’s cheap and widely available at Asian grocery stores, and it adds a breath of the sea to whatever you’re cooking.

  Lately I’ve been using it to make cheaper freshwater fish like tilapia and cat-fish taste a little more flavorful. Freshwater fish sometimes have a muddy taste (“off flavor,” it’s called in the industry), and a strong sauce, like this one, gives the fish a whole new life.

  I adapted this recipe after writing a New York Times Magazine story on Vietnamese catfish. You can use any white, flaky fish, but in Vietnam today, the most common fish is pangasius catfish, also known on the market as basa or tra. American catfish works great for this, too.

  Vegetable oil for frying

  2 pounds skinless catfish fillets

  Flour for dusting fish

  Salt to taste

  ¼ cup lime juice

  ¼ cup fish sauce

  Chopped cilantro to taste

  Pour the oil into a large skillet until it is about ⅛ inch deep. Put the heat to medium until the oil shimmers.

  Dredge the fish fillets in flour and shake off any excess.

  Place the fillets in the hot oil. Do not overlap or crowd in the pan.

  Brown the fillets on one side, then flip and brown on the other side (at this phase you’re just browning, not cooking all the way through).

  Remove the fish from the pan and drain on paper towel. Sprinkle with salt.

  Drain off the oil.

  Return the pan to the stove on a low heat.

  Deglaze the pan with the lime juice and the fish sauce, using a wooden spoon to scrape the batter off the bottom of the pan. Heat until just before boiling.

  Return the fish to the pan. Flip the fish once to make sure the sauce coats the entire fillet.

  Transfer to a warm serving platter and garnish with freshly chopped cilantro.

  Serve with rice.

  Pan-national Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Fish Cakes

  Serves 6 to 8

  One of my maxims is that wild fish are precious and should never be wasted. I fish pretty regularly, and inevitably I end up with fish at the bottom of my freezer that’s past its prime. When that happens, I’ll turn to this recipe. It’s an easy way to prepare fish in a ready-to-cook fashion. The cakes may be frozen and reheated later on. They are also an effective way to get people who may not like fish (such as children) to eat fish. The international spices mask most of the fishy flavor.

  3 medium potatoes

  4 good-size fillets of white-fleshed fish (tilapia, catfish, pollock—anything cheap), at least 2 pounds total

  Olive oil for frying

  1 large onion, minced

  2 stalks celery, minced

  2-inch chunk of ginger, peeled and grated

  3 garlic cloves, grated

  2 carrots, grated

  1 jalapeño pepper, minced (optional) 2 teaspoons horseradish

  1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

  1 teaspoon turmeric

  1 teaspoon cumin

  1 teaspoon coriander

  2 tablespoons salt (or to taste) 2 to 3 eggs

  1 cup bread crumbs

  3 tablespoons of tamarind or lemon juice

  Put the potatoes in their skins in boiling water. Boil until a fork poked in penetrates to the center of the potato easily. Run the potatoes under cold water and set aside.

  Dry the fish with a towel. Cut the fish into 3- to 4-inch chunks and put in a food processor. Pulse to grind, but try not to grind too much. The result should be chunky, not pureed. Empty into a bowl.

  Peel and lightly mash the potatoes.

  Sauté the onion and celery in olive oil.

  When the onion is translucent, add the ginger, garlic, carrot, potato, and jalapeño (if using).

  Sauté for 2 or 3 minutes and then add the horseradish, Worcestershire sauce, spices, and salt.

  Set aside and let cool to room temperature (so that the mixture won’t cook the fish when you add the fish).

  Pour off any liquid that might have come out of the pureed fish.

  Mix the vegetable mixture into the fish.

  Add the eggs, bread crumbs, and tamarind or lemon juice.

  Mix, preferably with your hands, as this will give you a better feel for the texture. If it’s too wet, add more bread crumbs; too dry, add another egg or a little bit of olive oil.

  Press into patties.

  Heat some oil in a skillet until it shimmers.

  Put in the fish cakes, taking care not to crowd the pan.

  Fry until medium brown (about 3 minutes).

  Flip and fry for another 3 minutes.

  Cover and turn down the flame, then cook 2 or so minutes more to make sure the cakes cook through to the center.

  Blot the cakes on paper towels before serving.

  Serve with a yogurt-cucumber raita or some kind of tartar sauce.

  Note: To freeze the cakes, cook them first and then defrost them by putting them in the oven at 350°F for 10 minutes or so.

  On the Shelf

  Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Marcella Hazan. It has great fish recipes (not just heads). I’ve substituted all kinds of fish for whatever she suggests in her recipes. I’m particularly fond of a complicated dish of hers where you bone a sea bass and stuff it with shellfish. Takes forever, but it’s delicious.

  Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky. In addition to giving good background about codfish, this book has some funny, ancient recipes for all sorts of cod parts.

  3men.com. If you’re ever of a mind to smoke fish, I have found this Web site very helpful.

  Jane Brody’s Good Seafood Book, Jane Brody. This is a good one if you’re trying not to add a lot of calories to the fish that you eat. I’m very fond of her fish-cake recipe and her smoked-fish chowder.

  SHANKAR VEDANTAM

  The Hidden Brain: Gender and Cooking

  Shankar Vedantam is a reporter for the Washington Post and the author of The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives. He loves food but is invariably pressed for time in the kitchen and is always on the lookout for delicious vegetarian recipes that can be whipped up quickly. You can correspond with him by visiting www.hiddenbrain.org.

&nbs
p; I woke with a start in the middle of the night. I had been dreaming about crows, potatoes, and a recently departed aunt whom I shall call Yashoda. She had died of complications stemming from diabetes. I lay in bed, watching the slowly rotating blades of a ceiling fan, and remembered the many times I had gone over to my aunt’s apartment when I was a child growing up in India. Before serving me delicious meals, Yashoda would lovingly place steamed rice and vegetable dishes on the ledge outside her kitchen window for the hordes of crows and sparrows perched there expectantly. It was a regular ritual, and the birds ate their lunch with what I can only describe as a sense of entitlement. Yashoda believed she was feeding her ancestors, who visited her kitchen window in the guise of birds. We never discussed the ritual; she thought it needed no explanation, and I did not foresee my rationalist objections gaining any traction. Besides, I wasn’t there to talk about religion; I was there to eat.

  In the next room that night, my infant daughter turned over in her sleep. I was in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles from my aunt’s third-floor apartment in India. I felt a twinge of sadness, for my lost childhood and my lost aunt, but also for my daughter, who would never meet her great-aunt, never watch the ritual feeding of birds that I had witnessed, and never eat Yashoda’s delicious meals. I remembered something the poet A. K. Ramanujam once wrote. There would always be a part of him, Ramanujam said in a poem addressed to his wife, that would be sealed off from her, and a part of her that would be sealed off from him. They could share every intimacy except their experiences as children: “Really, what keeps us apart at the end of years is unshared childhood.”