Page 35 - Delicious - UK (February 2020)

people.

just tomatoes and thyme from his garden.
It was the best fish I’d ever eaten.
Reading your book, I almost felt I was
reading a book of literature like Izaac
Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653). “It must
be confessed,” you wrote, “the life history cacciucco (pronounced ‘catchuko’), which you
of the sole is not entertaining, delicious recalled having in a restaurant in Viareggio
though it may taste.” And this about lobsters: on the Tuscan coast. You were mightily put
“One should, ideally, find a seaside town off when it arrived at your table, it being jet
where lobsters are caught and make an black from cuttlefish ink, but described it as
expedition, an occasion, if you like, which the best thing you’d ever eaten.
will become part of one’s family ritual.” Your recipe calls for all, or a selection of,
Your comments about caviar are fabulous: the following: squid, cuttlefish, lobster,
“Caviar is a grand and painful subject.” You
described it as nutritious and expensive with I was in awe of you… Your
“an air of mythical luxury… The food of czars,
fish book was my bible
of those incredible tyrants who cherished
fine fat fleas and Fabergé knick-knacks, while
most of their subjects lived in a poverty of langoustines, prawns, shrimps, mussels,
indescribable squalor”. Where does writing hake, john dory, weever fish, monkfish,
like this exist in cookery books now? rascasse, gurnard and red mullet. The pages
You wrote the book in the 1970s and of this recipe are splattered with tomato,
bemoaned people’s lack of interest in the testimony to the number of times I’ve cooked
enormous varieties of edible species. You it. The crowning glory of your cacciucco is the
filled the book with recipes for weever fish, toasted or fried bread you put in each guest’s
eel, dogfish, john dory, bluefish, conger eel, bowl prior to pouring on the stew. I found a
shark and shad, as well as those we know similar but simpler dish called cioppino, in
and love – turbot, cod, haddock, salmon, San Francisco of all places. In my recipe I’ve
dover sole, lobsters, crab, oysters, mussels used toasted sourdough bread rubbed with
and prawns. There were sections on smoked garlic. I hope you like it.
fish, wind-dried fish and even a recipe for the
sun-dried fish bombay duck. Yours sincerely
Yet you were aware you were writing for
a small audience. A particular thought you
noted at the time was that fish could not be
served as a main course “when men were
present as they needed steak or some other
good red meat”. How nourishing, though,
were your recipes; what man could fail to
be satisfied by a Ligurian fish stew called

Turn the page for Rick’s recipe →

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