"Il Canon" IV: Swordfish with Salmoriglio sauce

If I seem to be obsessed with the idea of a canon of food and recipes, it's because I am. The idea that there is some "codified" version of a recipe, which is the "correct" one in a culture's cuisine, fascinates me, the way there is a "correct" language, and then dialects that come off of it. NONE of us speak standard, written English all the time, in the same way that I KNOW that Italians don't all speak the codified Tuscan that is "proper" Italian all the time, and I'm sure that French and German speakers don't do it with their language either. When we HEAR that kind of change from the canonic form, no one really budges, unless it's inappropriate, i.e., you won't hear "rap" in a law firm board room, without some kind of reaction. But when you see it written down in a text of some kind, it always "jars," because it's WRONG... We're taught it's wrong.

In cooking, perhaps a little teaching is a bad thing. Beginning cooks are always looking for "the right way" to cook things. And unfortunately, there are way too many teachers who say "this is the right way to do this." I am not going to say that anything goes in cooking, far from it. If you feel that you MUST put strawberries into hot olive oil and fry them, well, be my guest. I will tell you that you will not like it, however. If you are going to substitute butter for olive oil in certain recipes, and vice versa, again, do it, but be careful. Add to that the fact that there are certain "constants" to dishes. On a simple level, a dish that is described as "veronique" will always have green grapes in it. A dish described as Florentine, will always have spinach. Why? Who knows? On a more fundamental level, there is always garlic in the wonderful Greek sauce and soup, skordalia, in the same way that there is always butter in hollandaise. Skordalia is a better example of what I'm going at here, because there is much more room to play within that sauce, as long as you keep some of the fundamentals. In hollandaise, there isn't much room for play.

These thoughts came to mind last night, for a number of reasons. Taking Italian lessons with two guys who are immersed in the finer points of literary analysis, and canons of literary construction as well as the canons themselves. And of course, talking with my friend Charlie about the canons of music, especially jazz, where a canon is being created and deconstructed, is interesting. So these thoughts are all running through my mind.

We get to the application of this to salmoriglio sauce, via way of Joe, my substitute teacher. Joe is a Sicilian American, and salmoriglio sauce is one of those food things that , at least to me, says SICILY in big, strong capital letters. I learned from a bit of research that in Sicilian dialect, it is called salmarigghiu , which is supposed to be "light brine," or something like that. Interestingly, salmoriglio as I know it is not very salty at all.

The fundamentals of the sauce are olive oil, lemon juice, salt, garlic and fresh herbs. Usually , the herb is fresh oregano; however, you can use dried. You can also use parsley. You can also use combinations of the two of them. I have seen recipes where olive oil and butter are combined. Sorry, but if you're going to do that, don't call it a Sicilian sauce. No butter in Sicilian main dish cooking. Where the recipes go all over the place is in the proportions of oil to lemon juice. Some recipes add water to help the emulsion. Some use more garlic than others. Some use lemon peel.

So, what's the "true, canonical recipe?" Who knows? It was Marcella Hazan who wrote the recipe with butter, so here I'm going to have to disagree with the expert. Water? That sounds like a convenience to bulk up the sauce, and make the work of emulsifying easier (which isn't that hard to do to begin with). So, when I made my sauce last night, I didn't feel bound to anything but the ingredients. And then I did something that I haven't seen in any of the recipes: I "cooked" my sauce.

Let me explain what I mean by that. In all of the recipes I have seen, you combine chopped garlic, lemon juice, salt, olive oil and herbs, and whisk them to an emulsion. I wanted to do something where the pieces of garlic were not in the sauce, so what I did was something that you do when making another classic, this one from further north, the Roman dish of spaghetti agloglio or spaghetti with garlic and oil. I learned when making this you slowly cook whole cloves of garlic in olive oil to flavor it, and that is the basis of your sauce. That sounded good to me. So for the two of us, I took about a third of a cup of olive oil, and put it in a pan with a very large, crushed clove of garlic. I cooked it very slowly, until the garlic was just browning, and then removed it. I let it cool while I was cooking the fish (more on that below). When the oil was cool, I added a big tablespoon of fresh oregano, and then the juice of one lemon. Plus a small teaspoon of salt. I whisked this right in the pan, and it came together as a thick emulsion almost immediately.

Now to the swordfish. We don't eat swordfish a lot, because I find it very fragile. Even more than oilier fish like bluefish, it seems to me that if I don't cook the swordfish immediately, it begins to go bad. But I had bought a one pound piece earlier that day, and it was fine. I oiled my grill pan, and patted the fish dry. Then I rubbed oil and salt on both surfaces. When the grill pan was hot, I cooked the fish for four minutes on each side. The fish was about half an inch thick, so what we wound up with was fish that was barely cooked, and even a bit raw in the center. That's how we like it, and it is decidedly NOT a European or Italian way to cook and eat fish. If you want it cooked more thoroughly, cook it for longer. I sliced it, the same way I would slice a steak (because to me, tuna and swordfish really ARE the "steaks of the sea"). We poured the sauce over the fish at dinner, saluted Joe and Sicily and had the dish with a "ragu" of baby artichokes (you'll get that one tomrrow), and some pasta, stolen from that other island home of great food, Sardinian fregola.

So, what's the message for today? I guess it's that we should all use canons as a place to start. But learn how to read the "codes" that govern these canons. Salmoriglio is more a technique than a recipe. Once you have the ingredients in hand, swing with it, play with it, and have some fun. You can use it on way more than swordfish. Douse potatoes with it, put it on lamb, put it on tuna, hell use it as a salad dressing. Just enjoy it.