There's no such thing as improvisation

One of the things I harp on when I'm teaching someone the rudiments of cooking is , like boy scouts, to "be prepared." In the kitchen, that means if you are planning to make a particular dish, be sure you have all the ingredients you'll need. I get on my soap box and stress, over and over again: what if you find you don't have it when you need it?

I should learn to practice what I preach.

Although, sometimes, when you're forced to work without a net, good things come of it. And the funny t hing about the improv session I'm writing a bout is that, at the end, when I thought I had come up with something new and interesting and innovative, on reflection I found I had reinvented the wheel. To paraphrase the very funny Fran Lebowitz: "people have been cooking for 3000 years, there is nothing new."

Well, yes and no. Anyway, here's the story.

I had planned to make a baked fish dish, using a mayonnaise cooking sauce. Using mayonnaise to coat fish is something I learned from our late friend Bill Campbell. He used to dredge flounder or cod in it, then bread it, and bake it. The mayonnaise would melt into the fish in the baking, leaving behind a noticeable tang, but no "globs" of the stuff on the fish. Eventually, I learned that this method is not uncommon in New England, especially if you're baking an especially thick piece of fish. The mayonnaise needs time to get into the fish, so it works really well with something thick, so that the fish doesn't in fact overcook.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by a recipe I found, for mayonnaise glazed halibut. Instead of breading, you were called upon to paint the fish with the mayonnaise, to which you had added chopped garlic. Then, the fish was cooked at 450 for only 15 minutes. T his was rather different from how Bill showed me how to make it, and how I had modified it. Bill baked his fish at 350, for THIRTY MINUTES. Eventually, I settled on 325 for twenty, but this new one, without the breadcrumbs, and at the high heat, was intriguing. Over the weekend, I planned on it for Tuesday dinner.

Tuesday DAY was a horror of disorganization, bad connections, a case of the "oopsies" as I dropped one thing after another - you know the deal - so after I had prepped vegetables and pasta to go with the fish, had preheated the oven, and got set to do my monkfish, it probably shouldn't have surprised me that I didn't have any mayonnaise. Nope. Had used it all at New Year's for the artichoke dip, and hand never replaced it.

OOPS.

I really wasn't in a frame of mind to start making mayonnaise fresh. Therapy, a probably misfire in my ongoing attempt to fix burned bridges, stress from a meeting at work that didn't happen, the whole nine yards said "No, no mayonnaise making tonight."

But what to do? Well... I thought about the components of mayonnaise: acid and oil and the garlic, and it sounded okay to me. So what I did was to get out the processor (I COULD have done this by hand, but I was feeling really stressed and lazy), and chopped three cloves of garlic. I had a small bottle of lemon juice, a left over from a cake that needed the rind of four lemons in the fridge, and of course, there was olive oil. I dumped the garlic in the processor, and added a hefty two tablespoons of juice and four of olive oil and juice went to work until it looked a bit thick. I added a pinch of salt to that.

I was working with monkfish, and it was a big, thick piece that I cut into slices. I put a bit of the sauce on the bottom of the pan, laid the fish on top of it, and then the rest of the sauce, and baked at that 450 for fifteen minutes.

Damn if it wasn't good. Probably better than if I had used mayonnaise. I was feeling pleased .

I remain pleased, but I realized last night that I had, essentially remade a classic of southern Italy, "salmoriglio sauce." Sicilians use this on tuna or sword fish, and while there are variants all over the place, like Greek skordalia, or vinaigrette, at its base the sauce is olive oil, lemon juice and garlic. Most use oregano as well, some use parsley, some leave out the garlic, but at base, what I did was what Sicilians have been doing for hundreds , perhaps thousands of years.

Oh well. But as far as I know, they've never used it on white fish like monkfish. And for all of my love of Italian cooking, one of the "rules" is that if you don't have the ingredients, you don't make the dish. So maybe we can call this "Salmoriglio, Annalena style?'