Stepping out

Years ago, in my 20s and 30s, I had the brave ambition of learning how to cook EVERYTHING. I wanted to cook Mexican food, Indian food, Chinese food, Italian food, French food. EVERYTHING. This was, of course, before we started looking at "NORTHERN French food, " or "Food from the Southeast Italian coast from longitude x to longitude y" or "Indian food of the Dravid diaspora," and all that stuff. But in any event, after doing this for a while, and performing "feats" like serving a different ethnic dinner every night, one thing became very clear: I was not doing very well at it. My Indian cooking was wretched. Oh, was it wretched. Not as bad as it is in some Indian restaurants, but I should never have put some of that food on people's plates. Chinese and Japanese food? Oh, heavens, the products were laughable. So I had to make some choices: what do I REALLY like? And that was easy: Italian cooking. Oh, do I LOVE cooking Italian dishes. And dishes of the Mediterranean coast, be they from France, Morocco, Crete, etc. There is an appeal that dishes with olive oil, herbs, tomatoes in season, figs, etc, have to me that is just not possible to explain.

Having said that, I also decided that while all of these Mediterannean cuisines have wonderful sweets, my very dogmatic opinion is that the United States' contribution to the world of cuisine is desserts. To me, NOTHING is better than good, solid American cobblers, pies, layer cakes, ice cream sundaes, and stuff like that. Yes, I can knock out a tarte tatin, and it's good. But ultimately, if you put down a tarte tatin and an American deep dish apple pie, I'm having the latter. And so it goes.

And I also extended the reach to Mexican cooking. SIMPLE Mexican cooking (because true Mexican cooking is very complex and very time consuming). I make a mole sauce every now and then, but by and large, my Mexican cooking sticks to the simple. This is about one of the dishes I make: my take on "Fish in the style of veracruz." In some respects, it's like Italian cooking, so maybe that's why I make it.

The dish came up recently, because the Karlins, without warning, did not come to the Farmer's Market. NO FISH. Now , what do I do for Tuesday night dinner, traditionally fish night?

A trip to Whole Foods provided a nice assortment of very beautiful stuff. None of which was catching my eye, until I saw the whole red snappers. and they were real. How can you tell? There are a lot of "red" fish that pass for red snapper? The answer is to look for another color. True red snapper has a horizontal line across its body, in a faint, but bright, yellow/green color. It doesn't hold in cooking, but it tells you "this is the real thing." So a whole red snapper went into the cart to come home for dinner. And I prepared it in modified veracruz style.

To me, veracruz style means a whole fish, seville oranges, perhaps limes and lemons, olive oil, garlic, herbs and mildly spicy peppers. We didn't have seville oranges, but we had "chinottos," these little tiny, very bitter oranges (think of the ones that g row on those orange trees you buy to bring home to your apartment, that die after three weeks. Those are chinottos). I squeezed about six of them to get juice , and then I sliced another two, to put in the cavity of the fish, with a few fresh herbs (parsley). I put a small film of olive oil on the bottom of my glass baking dish, and then a bed of sliced chinottos to hold up the fish (this proved to be a very good thing). I then cut three, deep slashes in the sides of the fish, and salted and peppered it. I also put some chinotto juice on top, and some slices of chinotto on the top. Then, the whole thing went into the oven at 400.

Stuffing a fish does something to the cooking time. You need about 50% more time. So while a recipe for a whole fish may take twenty minutes, if you stuff that cavity, you're going to need half an hour, as I did. I wanted a drier fish, so I didn't cover the pan with tin foil. That would have cooked it faster and made it wetter. Maybe next time, that will be the way to do it. Half an hour later, the fish was ready, and I served it up, off the bone, pouring the juices over the wonderful white flesh.

A very tasty light meal, served with fried potatoes and steamed spinach. Good for you too.

Fish is going to come up again real soon, as I try something that has intrigued me for years. I'm going to bake a whole fish in a salt crust. I'm really intrigued by this piscine version of "beggars chicken." Stay tuned. I'll let you know how it turns out.