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Vietnamese-Inspired Caramel Bluefish
This year, as the weather gets chillier, it’s more difficult than usual to welcome the fall. This fall doesn’t feel like a new start, as the fall often does, but instead feels like the beginning of a more difficult period of the pandemic, when gathering outside becomes less and less of an option. And so, even though it’s almost October, I’m posting a recipe about bluefish, a fish that conjures up images of summer and grilling and allows me to hold on to summer for one more moment.
There are so many ways to cook bluefish. You can marinate it and grill it. (A marinade of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, honey, and mustard, plus salt and pepper, is easy and delicious.) You can wrap it in aluminum foil and either cook it over the grill or in the oven, and then enjoy the soft and flaky meat, which turns almost white. You can eat smoked bluefish on crackers or as a pate. The world of bluefish is large and should be cherished. This recipe, from Melissa Clark, is cooked on the stove. It’s simple and can be made on a rainy day when you don’t want to go outside to grill. You just add everything to a pan, cook the fish in the sauce, and serve it. (You can also use other fish like salmon and mackerel for this dish.)
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Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad
Last summer, in what feels like an eternity ago, I visited a friend in London. We spent the days roaming the city, eating goat cheese and lox on baguette, and browsing through second-hand bookstores. In one of these bookstores, I spotted Luisa Weiss’s My Berlin Kitchen. Although my next flight was on EasyJet (which has notoriously terrible limits on carry-on luggage), I knew I had to buy the memoir – and somehow fit it into my already overly-full backpack.
This summer I pulled out the memoir to reread it, and one recipe stuck out: a potato salad with herring and beets. I don’t know what drew me to this, since I was never a huge herring fan. But the recipe kept calling to the Eastern European Jew in me, so one day I grabbed some beets and decided to make it. And I’m so glad I did. This salad is perfect for a hot summer day: filling, yet summery, sweet and a little salty, with just the right amout of crunch. Every time it has been above 90 degrees this summer, I find myself craving this potato salad. For the herring skeptics out there, it’s really good without the herring. But if you eat fish, please try it with the herring. I don’t think that you’ll regret it.
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Mediterranean Fish Stew
At some point during my childhood, fish stew became the dish that my father and I cooked together. This was always an extensive process: we’d buy or make fish stock, which was either bland or way too fishy; we’d cook bacon, chop up all the vegetables, add everything to the pot; and then we’d step back and wait. We’d taste it, realize it was all wrong (often too fishy), and separate the whole thing out into two pots and more or less start over. Somehow it always ended up tasting good in the end, although I still don’t understand how.
More recently, we’ve cooked various Mediterranean-style fish stews. This recipe is the most recent and, in my view, by far the best. I’ve simplified the original recipe so it can be made with household spices, added raisins to contrast with the saltiness from the anchovies, and chosen to use chicken stock instead of water, which some may see as sacrilegious. I don’t care; it’s my kind of fish stew. (I’ve also added shrimp, because what’s a fish stew without shrimp.)
Cod is the center of this stew. A bottom-dwelling fish, cod was once everywhere in the Atlantic; it’s said that you used to be able to walk across the ocean on the backs of cod. But after centuries of fishing, by the 1990s the stock on the North American side of the Atlantic had been drastically reduced – off Canada down to 1 percent of its former level, while on the US side down to around 3 or 4 percent.
