by Dan Barber
Again I asked Ángel if the broth was thickened with his famous fish eyeball puree. “You know, that idea also came from the laboratory. I learned fish eyes are about 67 percent protein. So, yes, I used it as a thickener,” he said, in a tone that suggested If you knew what I knew, wouldn’t you do the same thing? “It got a lot of media attention, which was nice, but I stopped doing it, because in order for it to work, you really had to use the eyes within the first few hours after the fish were caught. When the delivery arrived, all the cooks were racing for the eyeballs. It was ridiculous,” he said, and added, “Look, in the end I’m a pragmatist.” His bisque is thickened now with the protein from the bycatch, which he said is just as delicious.
Ángel told me he used to dream of dishes like that soup. “I was always given to fantasy—I had a very strong fantasy life as a kid. I was in my head so much of the time, imagining things, then getting into a lot of trouble. I caused my parents a lot of hardship. I didn’t do well in school, for example, because I hated sitting still—actually, I just really couldn’t sit still. My father would tie me to the dining table chair in exasperation and say, ‘Okay, fine, you’re not going to study, but you’re going to sit still.’”
Then one day, when he was ten years old, he set up a chiringuito, a beachside clam shack, outside his home. He cooked with different fish and shellfish, selling them to anyone who passed by. Ángel’s version of a lemonade stand.
“That’s how the world of cooking saved me,” he said. “It gave me a place where I could put that imagination. For a little while, anyway.”
It wasn’t until he was twenty years old that he was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “Things got a lot better after that. My parents, they’re both pathologists, which means they needed empirical evidence to prove I wasn’t just an asshole. And it worked. They finally understood what it was with me, and I felt liberated to be myself, because I wasn’t acting. This is who I was.”
The last course, arresting in its simplicity, was sea bream: two small fillets, with skin so perfectly grill-marked it looked as if it had been branded, and a small pool of phytoplankton cream. The waiter said the bream had been “perfumed with olive oil.”
Sea bream is a popular fish in Europe, sought after for its mild, white meat. It is one of the few species not threatened by overfishing, and when I suggested that this might be the reason it was on the menu, Ángel shrugged. “Bream remind me of my dad,” he said. “We used to fish for them. They’re a smart fish, very sensitive. So when we fished for bream, my father had all these rules, like you couldn’t talk on the boat—you couldn’t make a sound, actually—and when you cast your line, it had to go out 150 meters, not a meter less. He was so particular about it because he knew the bream were just too smart.”
I asked him about the perfumed bream, which tasted like it had once swum in an ocean of olive oil. He explained that the bream were grilled over olive-pit charcoal. For Spaniards, olives are just behind ham as one of the most basic products of the culture. “And do you know what that means?” he asked, again without allowing me to hazard a guess. “It means a table full of pits.”
Ángel carbonizes olive pits like you might carbonize wood to make charcoal. He said he’s perfected the charcoal to the point that it burns much hotter than wood—he usually brings it to 750 to 1,000 degrees Celsius, using a hair dryer to activate the heat. The fish cooks quickly. “You want crackling skin, but you also want the fish to gently confit,” he said, which is why for the bream he only brings the temperature to 75 degrees. “It’s a tricky balance, infusing the flavor of the delicate oil and the flavor of the smoke.”
Ángel sat back as the plates were cleared and lit a final cigarette. I asked him if eating sea bream reminded him of fishing with his dad. “Everything I’m doing lately is reminding me of my dad,” he said. “My very first memory of my dad is a heroic one. My father is deaf in one ear, and so as a result of that he never got seasick. We would go out in horrible seas, and my father would be fine. I remember one time in particular, a really rough trip out at sea, when everyone on the boat—there must have been ten of us—we were all throwing up all over the place. Nonstop vomiting. I looked over at my dad, and he was slowly sipping his beer and smiling at the sea. This happened several times when I was growing up. As a boy I didn’t understand why that was. I didn’t know that liquid in eardrums controls the sense of balance. All I thought was, This guy is Superman.”
Ángel sat up suddenly, checking his watch. “Anyway, my point is that my dad got me thinking anything is possible.”
It was nearly 5 p.m. when I said goodbye to Ángel outside his kitchen. He was anxious to get started on the evening’s menu, and I didn’t want to delay him. We promised to meet again soon.
As I waited for my bag, I walked back to the picture of Ángel as a squid. There was something revealing about the image; I thought about it long after I returned to Stone Barns. Visit a seafood restaurant anywhere in America, whether there’s white linen or checkered plastic covering the tables, and undoubtedly you’ll find a picture of the chef or owner posing alongside a prized catch—a swordfish, or an impossibly large striped bass. These triumphant photos smack of hubris, harking back to the days when the seas were full and the taking was good.
But Ángel’s portrait—if a little cheesy—is quite a bit different, and the effect is subtle but significant. He’s not lording over the giant squid (or any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of fish he’s caught in his lifetime); he’s emerging from its core, literally at one with the squid. The image is neither conquering nor celebratory. It’s humble in the same way Ángel’s cuisine is infused with humility, bringing to mind Klaas’s unassuming air, or Eduardo’s quiet respect for the dehesa. You look at the photo and see great reverence mixed with high-octane enthusiasm. The picture, like his food, tells you he speaks for the fish.
CHAPTER 17
NOT LONG after my transformative meal at Aponiente, I was back at Blue Hill at Stone Barns inspecting a fish delivery from our main purveyor. One of the drivers, Howard, always backs the van close to the receiving entrance and, as is my habit, I checked to see the fish awaiting delivery to other restaurants. We were the last stop that day; only a large tub of cod heads and bones remained, piled in the corner.
“Headed to Chinatown,” he said with a laugh, anticipating my question. I asked if he planned on selling them. “Sell the heads? Hell, no, I throw them away myself.”
I took them all, in an impulsive nod to Ángel. We’ve been serving steamed cod head ever since, one to share for a table of two. Some diners interpret it as a political statement, a way of saying there’s no more cod left in the sea. Some see it as a celebration of the fish. Still others are offended by the offering, if for no other reason than because of the cost of the meal. “An insult” was a comment left by one diner. Having now served a lot of fish heads—because they’re delicious, full of collagen-rich meat that’s nearly impossible to overcook—I’m reminded, with almost every delivery, that the real insult is throwing this large and delicious part of the animal away.
Americans consume seafood much as we consume meat. We’ll order bass or salmon or cod in a restaurant, just as we might order chicken or pork, and what we expect to eat (and are invariably served) is a seven-ounce chunk of the fillet. We eat high on the cod, in other words, as guilty of wasteful and blind consumption as eating high on the hog.
Both luxuries are sustained only by illusion. Industrial efficiency, fueled by grain subsidized with our tax dollars, has ensured a seemingly inexhaustible amount of meat in the United States, allowing us to conveniently discard the lesser cuts (or process them into chicken fingers and dog food). Likewise, our profligate seafood-eating ways are fueled by a seemingly endless supply, and that’s because fish are now farmed like any other protein.
The business of fish farming is nothing new. In China, it’s been around since the fifth century
B.C. But in the past fifty years, the industry has experienced an unprecedented boom. The 8.8% percent annual rate of growth, a clip the industry has averaged since the 1980s, is just enough to keep up with the world’s expanding appetite. (Production will somehow have to double by the middle of the century to meet demand.) More and more, experts believe it’s the future of fish eating. In fact, recent estimates suggest that by 2018, the seafood on our plates will more likely be farmed than fished.
There are plenty of arguments against aquaculture. For one thing, most aquaculture operations are located near the shore. Keeping your fish in calmer and more accessible waters makes good economic sense, but in most cases it does not make good ecological sense. Since the shoreline comprises a complex web of life—a vibrant edge effect—you’re inserting the equivalent of a large monoculture into a delicate cradle of diversity. With it come all of monoculture’s attendant needs, like antibiotics to stave off disease—most fish farms, like animal feedlots, require a near constant supply—and all of its destructive capacity, too, like fouling coastlines with concentrated waste.
Add to this the most compelling argument against aquaculture: it’s inefficient. To get a fish to market weight quickly enough to clear a profit, you usually have to feed it somewhere from two to five times its weight in wild fish. This feed conversion ratio (also known as FCR—the ratio of feed consumed versus pound of weight gained) means that in order to farm fish, you have to deplete wild fish stocks. Which means you’re still banking on the ocean’s productive capacity—borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. More recently, fish farms have begun substituting grains and oilseeds in their feed as fishmeal has become more expensive. But the rising cost of grain and competition from livestock producers (to say nothing of our flawed system of agriculture) suggests that these alternatives are no more sustainable in the long run.
Though chefs serve farm-raised fish all the time—they’re cheaper, they’re abundant, and they’re consistent—I didn’t know of any well-respected chefs promoting farm-raised fish. Farmed fish have an unsavory reputation among chefs for the same reason most musicians don’t talk up the wonders of computer-generated sound effects: we prefer the real thing.
FALLING IN LOVE WITH A FISH
Not long after our meal at Aponiente, Lisa called to tell me she’d recently returned from a food conference where Dani García, a young chef from Marbella, Spain, had spoken about a farm-raised sea bass so delicious it rivaled any wild fish he’d ever served. I told her he most likely didn’t mean it, discouraging her from learning more.
But Lisa, who knows a good story when she hears one, ignored my advice and forged ahead. The next time we talked, she was exploding with enthusiasm: this farm, Veta la Palma, was a model of sustainable production, she said. It raised fish in a way that didn’t harm the environment or the fish themselves. She claimed the fish were delicious and virtuous.
After months of repeated attempts, Veta la Palma was finally allowing her to tour the farm. The visit was to coincide with another trip I was making to Spain for a chef’s conference and then, afterward, to see Eduardo and the geese again—both within a short driving distance from Veta la Palma. I tried to get out of it, but since Lisa was my liaison with Eduardo (he answered her calls, not mine), I eventually relented and offered to drive out to visit the fish farm with her before seeing Eduardo.
The conference was in Seville, and the night after my presentation, we went with a group to a new restaurant in the center of town. Lisa pointed out a sea bass from Veta la Palma on the menu. Since we were headed to the farm the next day, I decided to order it.
I remember when the waiter set the bass down in front of me. The flesh, a pristine white, shimmered against the backdrop of a dark green herb sauce. The skin was cobalt black. Seared and roasted, it cracked apart with the tap of my fork, and right away the brilliant white flesh revealed that the fish had been overcooked. There was almost no moisture, for one thing, and the proteins had coagulated, so that the bass felt to the touch of my fork more like a tensed biceps. It had either been roasted at too high a temperature or for too long, or, from the looks of it, both.
Cutting off a piece of skin with my fork, I opted to taste it first, which was odd. I don’t like fish skin. I don’t like the acrid, tar-like taste, and I don’t believe you need a crisped skin to counter the softness of the flesh. We almost never cook the skin at Blue Hill. But the skin on the sea bass was wafer-like—delicate, crisp. Quick, flanking bites of the fish’s perimeter were excellent, too, and soon I found myself pushing the remaining fish into my mouth like a log into a chipper.
The fish was incredible. Even overcooked and tough—even D.O.A. (“dead on arrival”), as line cooks like to say when a fillet has seen too much heat—it made my mouth water. It was so richly flavored, you’d be forgiven for comparing it to a slowly cooked shoulder of lamb or a braised beef short rib. I’d never known bass could be so delicious.
We arrived at Veta la Palma the next morning. Miguel Medialdea, Veta la Palma’s biologist, met us at a bar in the town of Isla Mayor, just at the outskirts of the 62,000-acre Doñana National Park.
Miguel was wearing jeans, a flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and worn-in work boots that made him look like what I’d imagined Eduardo would look like: a farmer. He had the watchful reticence and physical bearing of a cattle rancher. Standing in an empty bar on the main street of the town, I almost expected tumbleweeds to blow through.
We ordered a round of espressos, and Miguel repeatedly welcomed us, admitting that we were among the first visitors he’d toured through the property. The company that owns Veta la Palma, Pesquerías Isla Mayor, almost never allowed visitors (though they probably had never encountered a visitor as tenacious as Lisa). I got the sense that Miguel was even happier to see us than we were to see the farm.
Downing his espresso like a shot of tequila, he began with a brief history. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Miguel said, the land was in the hands of an Argentinean conglomerate. The company rebuilt and expanded a series of canals the British had originally constructed in the 1920s. They strengthened flood fences and extended drainage systems, eventually draining the marshland and creating grazing land for a large cattle operation. By almost every measure, the plan failed. Economically, it never made much money. Environmentally, it was a disaster. Birdlife, for example, plummeted by 90 percent—and for an area at the tip of southern Spain, the final layover along the migratory route to Africa, this was a lot of birds. Political problems developed as the Argentineans’ relationship with the Spanish government became fraught. In 1982, fearing a government takeover, the Argentineans opted for what amounted to a fire sale. Veta la Palma was born.
Now at the driver’s seat of a minivan and taking us around the outskirts of the farm, Miguel described what happened next. “We used the same channels built originally to empty water into the Atlantic, and reversed the flow,” he said, circling his hand counterclockwise to show the simplicity of the idea. They flooded the canals with estuary water instead of pushing it out, filling the forty-five ponds and creating an eight-thousand-acre fish farm.
Working with the Spanish government, which by 1989 controlled Doñana National Park, the company went about integrating the conservation ethic of the park with the economic activity of the farm.
“It’s the idea of utilizing, or using, in order to conserve,” Miguel said as we sped along a dirt road, the flat marshland intercut with long canals on either side of us. “We like to say we’re a national park with a belt of human activities.”
As Lisa spoke to Miguel in Spanish, I sat in the back of the van and stared out at the endless expanse of wetland. A burnished tobacco light washed over the scene. In the distance, several cars were caravanning along another long stretch of dirt road, kicking up dust, their windows reflecting the southern Spanish sun as they moved across the landscape. It was like being in the middle of a desert, except that we were surrounded by lush g
rass and plant life, and wide canals corralled water everywhere around us.
And yet the placidity of the landscape tells only part of the story. There’s another angle, or maybe another story entirely, about the wetlands. It’s a story that looks at Veta la Palma as yet another edge, a place where two ecosystems—land and sea—meet, and where life flourishes as a result. That calm surface is a front for the furious activity taking place just below.
We usually think of a beach as the demarcation line between land and sea, the land gradually handing itself over to the waves. But the neat divide of an ocean tide line is deceptive. Land doesn’t give up easily, as anyone who snorkels or dives knows well. The continental shelf continues for many miles underwater, sloping down along the way until, finally, it ends.
The ocean’s edge is “the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.” Those are the words of Rachel Carson, an English major turned marine zoologist and the author of Silent Spring. While Carson is widely credited with winning the ban on DDT and helping ignite the environmental movement in this country, she is less well-known for what occupied most of her life: the oceans. Before publishing Silent Spring, Carson wrote three books on the subject, all best sellers, including The Edge of the Sea, in which she takes readers to the shoreline and just beyond.
Carson owned a home on the coast of Maine, which served as both an observatory for her fieldwork and a place to write. In her introduction to The Edge of the Sea, oceanographer Sue Hubbell explains that for many years Carson worked on a field guide of what could be found along the coast. Except it didn’t get very far. Carson struggled. She complained of writer’s block in letters to her editor. Realizing she was writing “the wrong kind of book”—that readers needed to feel an emotional connection if they were going to be compelled to protect something—she abandoned the field guide project and decided instead to focus on the interractions between the organisms.