If I had time, I'd drive to Acco port very early in the morning and buy all the small and reject fish that the fishermen cannot sell. I'd put all in an iron cauldron with 1/3 seawater and the rest tap water. I'let it boil on a campfire for a long time, till the soup becomes thick. Then I'd add fresh water and enjoy my basic bouillabuise. But no time for nothing.
17 comments:
I love the small fish. When I was growing up, we lived not far from the sea but there was no real fishing port nearby. However, there was one shop (and only one shop) that sold the bay flounder - small flat fish (a little bigger than the size of your hand) that were harvested from a bay that is cut off from the open sea by a barrier island. When we would buy them the fish were still twitching with life. The flesh was very sweet.
In America there was a very fat (and therefore very good) chef from Louisiana who used to say that water was for washing dishes, not cooking. You want to cook fish in an aromatic broth that has onions, garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, bay leaves, parsley, etc. (the French use fennel but I detest it). You can cook the vegetables in advance but once you put the fish in you don't want to cook it very long - the fish protein is very delicate. Maybe 15 minutes, if that.
K
The secret of cooking an excellent soup with cheap, small, unsellable, unattractive fish is to cook it for long.
Also Jewish cuisine in Eastern Europe used the cheapest meats and cooked it slowly and for very long (like kishkes in tcholent) to make it palatable. Delicious.
Cooking tough cuts of meat for a long time makes sense. Tough cuts contain collagen in the gristle which takes a long time to break down. Cooking fish for a long time does not - all fish is tender. Some of the old recipes for gefilte fish call for cooking it for hours and hours. From a food safety POV, as soon as it hits 70C, all organisms are dead - this only takes a few minutes. I do save the head and bones of the fish and cook them first (and then remove them) so that the broth is rich and gelatinous, but the flesh is very delicate and is ruined by long cooking. I'm not sure why the old recipes call for such long cooking, except that maybe they were used to cooking EVERYTHING until it was extremely well done - meat, fish, vegetables, everything. Especially during the long winters, the stove would be going constantly (but at a low heat) to warm the room, so you would just put your pot on the stove early in the day and let everything simmer and simmer. Cholent would be taken to the bakers oven after he was done baking bread and cooked in the residual heat.
Jewish law does not permit consumption of blood and my parents would recoil in disgust at the sight of someone eating a rare steak. In their style of cooking, there was never a trace of red or even pink in their meat - everything had to be uniformly brown and well done.
K
It makes sense to cook everything very long because it improves digestibilty and the calories extracted. When people was famished, mincing the meat and the fish and cooking slowly and many hours made sense.
70 degrees celsius does not kill patogens, may be you are confusing with pasteurization. Even 100 celsius allows the survival of viruses such as polio.Boiling the water should last five to ten minutes.
I think food scientists are underestimating the calories content of modern foods. They are finely grounded, well cooked, easily digested. 100 gr meat fifty years ago was very different from current product of the same name.
Over-cooking meat may at least partly explain the incidence of colorectal and other cancers in your community.
Anon.
I think cancer is more associated with fried or grilled meat - there are carcinogenic compounds that form when the meat chars. E. European cooking was mostly based on boiling or roasting in a covered pot (braising).
The usual danger from undercooked food is bacteria, not viruses. All the common harmful bacteria (salmonella, e coli, etc.) are dead at 70C and even at 60C if you hold the temperature for a few minutes. I suppose it is correct to call that pasteurization rather than sterilization but it is sufficient for food that will be eaten immediately and not held at room temperature.
I don't know the data on the digestibility of raw vs. cooked meat, fish, etc. The Japanese seem to survive very well eating fish that is entirely raw.
K
K, you are correct in that the risk of carcinogen formation with red meat is much increased in high-temperature cooking, eg barbeque ("braaivleis" where I come from) and frying, as opposed to stewing at a lower temperature.
Anon.
"The Japanese seem to survive very well eating fish that is entirely raw."
They flash-freeze sushi to kill the fish tapeworms.
Freezing is only necessary for fish that spend part of their life cycle in fresh water (e.g. salmon). Parasites do not affect fish that spend their whole life in salt water. In any case, I was referring to the accessibility of the protein - J seemed to think that it is necessary to cook fish in order to digest its protein fully. I'm not sure that's true.
K
K
Actually this is highly controversial and curiously understudied subject. Humans - of a sort - existed for millenia before the taming of fire; so we must be able to extract enough to survive and breed.
Apparently, there are conflicting processes at play which make the net effect of cooking vary depending on the type of meat, the temperature, the length of cooking, etc.
See, for example:The energetic significance of cooking.
Rachel N. Carmody, Richard W. Wrangham
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 0J Hum Evol. 2009 Oct;57(4):379-91.
Factors of relevance include how much fat drips away as waste, killing of pathogens, denaturation of proteins altering enzymic digestibility in opposing ways, destruction of endogenous inhibitors of human digestive enzymes, improved palatabilty leading to increased intake, sequestration of essential amino acids in the flavor-producing Maillard Reaction, energy-savings from not having to transfer body heat to the food, etc, etc. Some of these are pro-cooking, some anti, and some a bit of both.
Basically, we can digest and live on raw food but we don't do as well as with cooked food; but this is partly a result of improved access to calories, and not just to do with protein.
Probably, fire has been with us long enough to engender adaptive selection in the human race, so we are probably better adapted to cooked food than were, say a million years ago. It is a matter of controversy (what isn't?) as to when humans regularly used fire for cooking, warmth and protection from carnivores, but sometime between 1.5M and 500000 yrs ago is the current best estimate.
It is inferred, eg, that H. antecessor, could not have colonized Northern Europe without adequate control over fire, and this has been dated to about 800000 yrs - 1M yrs ago.
Anon.
Thanks Anon. - We evolved from splitting raw bones to eating cooked food a long time ago. Food preparation was always a lot of work and area for specialists (cooks), but today food comes completely processed and it is easy to digest. Sometimes digestive enzimes like papain are included. I insist that the calories printed on the packets are wrong, and we extract more calories from the what we eat than declared.
And food is extremely cheap. A typical English working family used to spend half of its income in feeding its family, and England was the wealthiest place by far for a long time. Nowadays food is free in America (for the "poor") and very cheap elsewhere.
There was recently a study that confirmed that "food deserts" (supposed ghetto areas where no fresh vegetables are on sale, so the people are very fat) do not actually exist - they are entirely mythical. This was glaringly obvious to me - I travel from my wealthy suburb to shop at a large modern supermarket in the ghetto. The turnover at the store is fantastic because the customers don't have to pay, so they buy like crazy. They load their carts to the top. Other than myself, I rarely see anyone paying with anything but food stamps. The owner of the large modern supermarket drives a Bentley (I kid you not). But the food desert thing kept getting repeated in the press. The next obvious thing (which has not been printed yet) is that the actual reason the people in the ghetto are fat is because they get free food. When you reduce the price (of anything) the quantity demanded increases. Sometimes I think liberals' heads will explode from all the cognitive dissonance between what they see with their eyes and what they are supposed to believe.
K
K
I am concerned your shopping at this place represents a false economy; the other "shoppers" might notice you actually pay for stuff, and dress a little differently from them, etc, and decide to liberate your wallet one day.
Which might result in an argument of sorts, the type in which your rhetorical skills will not be of much immediate use.
Anon.
I've never had any problem but yesterday two Canadian tourists in Atlantic City were stabbed to death by a female "local" in the course of a robbery, not one block from the gambling casino, so in retrospect I may be pressing my luck - I could visit 99 times and be just fine but on the 100th visit something could go badly wrong. Just recently an even more spectacular supermarket opened in a nearby suburban area where the shoppers mostly actually pay for their stuff, so I may be doing more of my shopping there.
Speaking of "urban" vs. suburban, there is apparently a lawsuit by the Chinese parents of a University of Southern California (USC) who was murdered near campus. Apparently in Chinese , "urban" is a good thing, meaning civilized so they didn't get the code words when the school literature said that the campus was in an "urban area" (meaning ghetto).
K
I second Anon's concern for you, K. The other customers may misunderstand your excentricity in giving the cashier good money for free food. They may dislike your persistent violation of local customs and some may even want to politely correct your misbehaviour.
As I have mentioned before, I have never had any problems in the ghetto, but I will nevertheless reconsider my future shopping destinations.
Once when I was at a (self service) gas station in the ghetto, a guy attempted a scam by presenting himself as the attendant, pumping the gas for me and then not resetting the pump at the end, so that the next purchase(s) would register on my credit card. Presumably he was then planning to pump gas into other people's cars and pocket the cash, or maybe he had co-conspirators waiting to get their cars filled this way. I realized he was not a real station employee, but I thought he was just a panhandler angling for tips in return for pumping service. However, as I was leaving I noticed that he did not properly hang up the pump so that it would not reset. He had some way of resting the nozzle in a way that it appeared hung up but did not hit the reset lever. I then asked the "attendant" to cause the pump to print a receipt, so he had to reset it at that point (while maintaining the charade that he was an attendant and not a scammer). The real gas station attendant was hiding in their bullet proof cashier's booth and was apparently oblivious to the scheme.
This was as close as I came to being a "crime victim" in the ghetto so far and I have to give the guy credit for the (modest) cleverness of his scam which was at least non-violent.
K
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