Fishing for compliments
Our upstairs neighbor, G.S., now retired, finally has all the time he wants to go fishing. I understand that this is the dream of many men, and he is living it to the full.
He sits in his boat on some expanse of water — naturally he will never tell us where, and Lino, a fisherman himself, will never ask. He sets up three fishing rods, and with what appears to be superhuman talent always brings home something. Often, many somethings. Which he sometimes shares with us.
First, he passes our kitchen window, which is usually open except in the depths of winter. He may call a friendly greeting, or Lino may already have heard him tying up his boat. So G. will pause, and Lino will indulge in what seems to me to be lots of time discussing the day’s conditions, catch, and other occult particulars of the angler’s art. Lino never fished with a rod (he prefers the leister, or what I simply call a “trident” even though it has many more than three prongs). But he knows as much as anyone about the lagoon environment and the customs of its finny fauna. So they confer for as long as they feel like it, then G. goes around the corner and upstairs.
For quite a while, he would sometimes reappear (three flights of stairs, twice — what a guy) and plop a plastic bag of some of his fish onto the windowsill. And not just any fish. Gilthead bream (orata, or Sparus aurata), sea bass, seppie, and assorted companions who made the wrong decision by thinking “Gosh, if the bream bit, it must be good. I think I’ll try it.”
He would briefly and modestly accept our praise and thanks. Like anyone who does something really well, he considers most compliments to be mere statements of the obvious. I once complimented the wife of a trattoria-owner in our old neighborhood on her fried meatballs. “They’re the best meatballs in Venice,” I said, thinking I’d give her pleasure. “I know,” she replied. And that was it. Once I recovered from the sensation of having missed a step going down the stairs, I realized that she couldn’t honestly have said anything else. If she didn’t know how good they were, who would?
Back to G.
Matters have taken a new turn. He comes home, he passes the window, he shows Lino the catch, they talk, he goes upstairs. Normal. But the other evening, after a few minutes, we heard him call. Then a plastic bag tied to a string mysteriously appeared, descending from above, framed in the doorway.
People still sometimes let down baskets to pull up whatever they need (everybody’s got flights of stairs), and more than sometimes they let down their bags of garbage and leave them hanging on a long cord for the garbage collector to retrieve. (Except they won’t be doing that tomorrow, because the garbage people are going to be on strike. Gad.)
I suppose if we lived on the third floor and he on the ground, he’d call for us to let down a basket, bag, tray, some kind of receptacle, and we’d pull up the fish, sometimes still thrashing. His generosity means that we now eat fabulous fish at least once a week. But it’s beginning to be hard to keep up with him. When somebody gives you eight or ten bream, which is one of the most valued fish in the Venetian culinary repertoire, you feel joy and gratitude and bursts of self-congratulatory health. But you can’t eat eight or ten at one go, and the freezer is beginning to murmur in a discontented sort of way, probably beginning to consider staging a mutiny of the bounty.
But we have put our hand to the plow, as the Good Book hath it, and, as advised, we are not looking back. If fresh fish is to be our fate, we will just keep on accepting it.
Cuttle-cooking
A super-sharp friend has just written to me, and apart from remarking pleasantly on my prose and panache, and admiring my musings on cuttlefish and the meaning of life (I think that was what I was doing), asked me why I didn’t explain how to cook them.
This blast of practicality was just what I needed, the perfect antidote to wandering around discoursing on how the once-delectable and desired seppie had become, through exaggeration, just Something Else to be Dealt With in Life.
I will now describe the process, in the style of Mrs. Beeton and others of her era, who were not too precise about quantities of ingredients (example: “a wine glass” amount of something. What wine? Bordeaux? Chardonnay?). But I will approximate as best I can. Here is the recipe according to Chef Lino of the Trattoria Bella Venezia, otherwise known as our kitchen:
INGREDIENTS:
2 pounds of seppie, cut in bite-sized pieces, with the ink sacs removed and put aside
extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup chopped onion
1/2-3/4 cup of tomato sauce (not seasoned, just cooked strained tomatoes) OR
a big squirt of tomato paste, diluted
Salt
Pepper
TO COOK:
Saute’ the onion in a biggish pot.
Add the tomato sauce.
Add lots of water (1 1/2 quarts, more or less).
Add some salt and pepper (the seppie need to cook with some salt, but I suggest putting a minimum amount because as the sauce cooks down, the salty flavor will become stronger).
Bring to boil.
When the liquid boils, add the pieces of seppie, and the “latti” also (see below).
Take the ink sacs one by one, gently tear them to release the ink into the water, and drop the sacs into the water.
Simmer the seppie in the blackish liquid until the sauce is reduced to a thickish consistency and the pieces are tender.
Eat with pasta, eat as risotto, eat with polenta.
Two notes:
Watch the heck out for the ink as you work with it (and the inky sauce, too) because it makes a stain which is virtually impossible to remove from fabric. Or wear black clothes.
Whether you prepare pasta or risotto, you not only are permitted, you are essentially required, to add grated Parmesan cheese. Venetians don’t put cheese on any fish dish, as far as I know, but seppie requires it. I’ve tried seppie without cheese, and it has a wan, Little-Match-Girl sort of flavor. Try it yourself if you doubt me.
CLEANING SEPPIE:
This section is a public service.
I suppose that whatever fish market sells cuttlefish in your neighborhood will have someone capable of removing all the inedible bits before you take them home. But Lino does the operation himself, and if you were ever to want to see a perfectly happy man, you would have to see Lino cleaning seppie. But he can’t clean yours, so if any brave reader wants to chance his or her arm, here is how you do it.
Press outward on the head so that the mouth comes forward. Pull it out. Be careful, because there is a very sharp little “beak” in there.
Make an incision with a sharp knife in each eye, then press behind them in such as way as to make the whole eye apparatus come out.
Taking the body of the seppie in both hands, press against it toward the head, in order to push out the solid white cuttlebone. If you have any friends with birds, you can give it to them and make them happy.
Make an incision in the back of the cuttlefish and open it. You will see the ink sac. Remove it v-e-r-y c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y. Of course, if you don’t want to put ink in the sauce, just throw it away, but I think eating seppie without their ink is like writing without verbs.
Put each ink sac into a small container for the moment; Lino uses an espresso cup.
Inside the seppia you will see two smallish white globes with a small red mark on them. These are the “latti,” or “latte,” and are the ovaries, if you want to know. Remove them and keep them to add to the pot. (Or, you can boil them, add some salt, pepper, and olive oil, and you’ve got one fantastic little antipasto.)
Now tug on the edge of the seppia’s body and pull off the skin. It may come off in pieces. Persevere.
Cut the flayed seppia into bite-sized pieces.
You’re done. Go give yourself a reward.
Swamped by the seppie
I realize that cuttlefish do not loom large on many people’s culinary must-eat lists. Nor, if you’re a sport fisherman, on your must-catch list.
Excuse me if I bring them up again, because contrary to any impression I may have given that I’m obsessed with them, I’m not, no matter how many times they undulate their way into my blog. They’re always here for a reason. And the reason just now is because of their quantity this season, which is exceptional.
The plethora of seppie this spring is approaching the level of annoying. (Think of the brooms-with-buckets multiplying exponentially in Fantasia‘s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The situation here would be brooms-with-buckets-sloshing-with-seppie, more and more, on and on.) That’s what it looks like to me.
My delight — and I think Lino’s, too — in seeing (A) dazzling fresh seppie in the fish market and (B) dazzlingly low prices has been fading for a while now due to the sheer quantity of the tentacly treasures. Something that once was a special treat has become a freaking fardel, a burden, practically a punishment. It’s become something like finding ourselves overwhelmed every day for weeks and weeks with Almas caviar, Wagyu beef, Swedish moose cheese, all floating on a high tide of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1982. Even all that would lose its appeal. We’d start dreaming of scrambled eggs. The seppie are proof of it.
First, we bought them, and we were happy in our simple pleasure. Then the indefatigable fisherman upstairs gave us a bag. And we rejoiced. Then he gave us another bag, and we smiled. Then Lino went to the rowing club and discovered buckets of the critters just removed from the fishing net; several people urged him to help himself, but he said, “No, but thanks just the same.”
Now the phone rings, and it’s his son. The nets that he and his friends put out by the fondamenta where he works have yielded up another major haul, and he says he’s got a bag ready just as soon as we can come by. What could Lino say? Of course he said “Great, I’ll be there tomorrow morning.” (I’d have preferred hearing him ask, “You don’t happen to have a kilo of Alba truffles, by any chance?” But that would have been so rude. And pointless.)
We put the last batch in the freezer, for Lord’s sake, something we never do because you can’t freeze the ink. Only God knows how we’re going to eat all this. Sandwiches. Hash. Croquettes. Casserole surprise. Parfait.
Lino says the next time he hears our neighbor’s boat returning, he (Lino) is going to close the shutters and turn out all the lights. But I think we’d start hearing strange knocks on the door, and look out to find a herd of seppie on the steps waving their tentacles and saying “What’s wrong with us? You loved our parents. Let us in! Throw us in the pot! Hurl us onto the griddle! Send us to Valhalla with the seppie warrior-maidens!”
There are two sayings here, which mean the same thing: “Piove sempre sul bagnato” (It always rains where it’s wet) and “Quando sei ubriaco tutti ti danno da bere” (When you’re drunk, everybody offers you a drink). The seppie now need their own proverb. I’m working on it. It will be essentially the same idea, but squishier.
Springing ahead
Although we certainly can’t complain about the winter we haven’t had — all the cold and snow were re-routed to other parts of the world — spring is still exerting the old rousing-the-bear-from-hibernation force around the neighborhood.
So I festivate the equinox with a string of springy pictures, in no particular order, because I have the sensation that everything is happening pretty much in unison, like the Rockettes. This wonderful, too-brief phase comes down to essentially two things: Fish and flowers.
