India is a treasure trove of fish; here's why we should be pescatarian!
economictimes.indiatimes.comfish markets, you often see a vendor with a long fish with several diagonal cuts, but not detached from the spine. When she holds it up, the segments splay sideways like a fleshy Christmas decoration.
This is karli or wolf herring (Chirocentrus dorab), a fish notorious for its twisty bones. “Everybody agrees that this is a deplorably bony fish, but many regard this disadvantage as outweighed by the good taste of the flesh,” writes Alan Davidson in his 'Seafood of South-East Asia'. This style of cutting helps slide the flesh off the bones.
Davidson notes that in Hong Kong, it is used for fish balls. These are among a range of recipes where fish is deboned, usually mixed with a filler like breadcrumbs or mashed potato, and a binder like egg, and then fried, baked or poached.
Every culinary culture which loves fish has some version of this — like French quenelles de brochet, a haute cuisine classic where pike, a bony freshwater fish, is deboned and made into light dumplings.
Japan has kamaboko, fish cakes, which can be formed and coloured in different ways, like narutomaki, made with a pink spiral that recalls a famous whirlpool. Portugal’s love of salt cod created pasteis de bacalhau, which a few Goa restaurants used to make, but it has vanished now.
At the end of his life, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks rediscovered gefilte fish, jelly-like fish balls fed to Jewish children and invalids: “Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, eighty-two years ago.”
One of the specialties
