Upcoming Posts and a Fish Fry

Part of the trouble with having a blog is that you really do have to figure out what your subject is, and it has to be something you're willing to write about almost every blessed day of the week. We here at BTiGB are not so good at consistency, but we are trying to get better.

I have decided that this summer will be the summer of food, and a lot of other things (what, you think I could help it?), but mostly food.

Come Fry with Me
This weekend was a fish fry weekend. See, the roommate is out of town, so I can stink up the apartment all I like with my fish fry. I open the windows, make no mistake, but you can't hide a fish fry. When I was a kid, my parents had (and still have) these cheap plug-in electric fryers, two of them, square with rounded corners, Teflon-treated inside (although that didn't hold up for long), and a grim avocado or bile green enamel on the outside surfaces. They ran extension cords from the house and set the fryers on the splintery boards of the patio. I can see as well as if it were happening right before me (although with her bad knee she couldn't manage it any more) my mother squatting next to the fryer, tongs in hand, turning them over, wincing at the occasional jumping splatter when liquid ran out of the fish and into the simmering oil.

As the breeze kicked up, I'm sure the whole neighborhood could smell it, the golden, oily, glorious, slightly embarrassing, polarizing odor of frying fish. For some reason, the bloom of grilling hamburgers is a smell few Americans would disdain. When that bloody, bovine, meaty cloud comes wafting over you, your mouth waters, and people dream of ketchup and juices dripping down their chins, of potato salad and strawberry Jell-O quivering in bowls. But the odor of frying fish is not a sure winner. Half of them think it's delicious, half of them think it's foul and unbreathable. They shut the windows, turn on the air filters, attack the living room with lilac blasts of Glade. Fish fry odor lingers, too. You smell it in the curtains. You smell it in your hair. You smell it on your fingers and your lips.

My parents would fry a dozen small fish at a time, whole, dipped in just enough flour to give their skins that necessary rough crispness. They would fry them until they were practically jerky, dried and dark brown, then they would drain them on paper towels, wrap some in foil, and eat them with the rice soup known as jook or congee, or eat them simply with rice, the dark amber flesh torn off the bone with the hands.

I still love a fish fry; fish, as my father said over and over, is brain food. But I've gone a bit Anglo-American in my fishy habits. I like the flesh juicy and white. I like tartar sauce. And I don't have a patio.

Anyway, among other things learned this weekend, I discovered that there is no earthly reason to buy tartar sauce.

Tania's Tartar Sauce
1/2 cup of mayo
1/2 cup of yogurt
juice of half a lemon
heaping tablespoon of sweet or dill relish
tablespoon of finely chopped onion
tablespoon of chopped parsley
tablespoon of chopped dill

Mix it all up thoroughly with a fork, and chill for two hours before serving.

A Fish Fry
1. Get a good fillet of flaky white fish — in my case, $2.50 worth of scrod. What on earth is scrod, I said to the boy, about 10 or 11 years old, chubby, a little shy but learning how to work up a patter with paying customers next to his wry fisherman dad at the table at the Greenpoint Farmer's Market on Saturday. He had a dusting of freckles like cinnamon across his pale milky cheek, rosy with a little sun, and his face was round as the moon, with soft girly features and a fringe of brown hair. He had the shaky confidence of someone without natural confidence, but whose father would give him a talking to if he didn't speak up. The boy said to me that scrod was his favorite kind of fish, better than cod. I looked it up. Scrod isn't even a kind of fish. It's just a young white-fleshed saltwater fish, cod or haddock generally, sort of a catchall word meaning "catch of the day." The fillets were meaty and long and they looked and smelled fresh. Fish should not smell fishy. Fish should smell of the sea, fresh and briny, with a cold breezy marine cleanness. If the fish smells like ammonia or in any way bad, skip that fish. If all the fish smell like that, make burgers.

2. Heat your pan. I use a well-seasoned 15" cast-iron skillet, because it retains heat well, and because I like the look of it. Teflon shouldn't be used above medium heat, and so Teflon is useless. Food does not stick to well-seasoned cast-iron. When the skillet is hot, pour in oil about half an inch deep. I use peanut oil. Let heat till it's just below smoking.

3. Coat your fish. If you're going to deep-fry the fish, you can use a classic beer batter or what have you. I pan fry the fish, and I use a crumb coating. This time I threw into the mini-Cuisinart the end of a whole-wheat loaf of bread that had lived out its useful life. The best crumb coating, though, is made of crackers. In a pinch, you can use white flour. I'd say about a cup of the stuff, plus a little salt and pepper, will suffice. On a dinner plate, you spread your crumb coating. You beat an egg in another bowl, then dip the fish fillet in the egg, let the excess drip off, then dip in the crumb coating. There you go.

4. Lay the fish in the oil, let it get golden, turn it, let it get golden on the other side. Fish cooks quickly, but make sure it's cooked. Lift out your biggest piece with tongs when it looks done, lay it on paper towels, break it apart at its widest part, check if the flesh is opaque and flaking. Yes? Cooked. No? Lay that sucker back in the pan.

5. Serve with tartar sauce and a salad of fresh lettuce leaves from the same farmer's market, dressed in lemon juice and olive oil with a little shallot diced into it if you've got it.

Variation
With my Vietnamese habits learned from Mom, before cooking the fish, sometimes I like to cut the fillet crosswise into one-inch strips. When they're fried, I lay a strip across a lettuce leaf, pour a spoonful of tartar sauce across the strip, fold up the bottom and then roll up the sides, and eat it like that. If you're going to do this, be sure you've got a whole pack of napkins on hand. If no one else is around, use a towel and save a tree.

Best accompanied with a tall iced glass of lemonade or a cold lager. Next time, I may even make coleslaw.

—T.