The pear tree in my garden is about to burst into blossom. It is only about three degrees of separation between that first blossom and my first al fresco seafood meal of the year, and as such, I find myself consumed by a craving.
I was also reminded this week that, as a child, peering into the bathroom mirror one day whilst brushing my teeth, I was struck by having a choice; I could decide to look after my teeth and make sure I brushed them properly, day in, day out, or I could decide to eat a careful and healthy diet and look after myself physically; but for some reason, instinctively, I felt I couldn't do both. Not because they were mutually exclusive activities, they clearly aren’t, but instead. I guess, from a knowledge of my limited capacity for giving a shit. Instinctively I felt I could muster enough care to keep my teeth clean but get chubby, or visa versa, but not both. And typing it out now I feel irrational neural twinges that suggest the logic makes some sense, still.
The point is, I sometimes feel the same way about food. On the one hand, one has sustainability and the environment, on the other wellness and a good diet. We can, and perhaps should strive to give as much care as possible in all directions, but in reality, more often than not, with the chaos of life exerting pressure from every side, one only has the capacity to focus on a single element at any one time, but somehow not both.
Every couple of years the merry-go-round of virtuosity stops at fish and we all get a chance to castigate or applaud ourselves for how saintly we are, or aren’t. The list of sustainable fish, for instance, will confirm that we are right to be eating X and Y, but that we’ve been caught out by eating Z. I wonder, though, if the reality is less complex?
I was recently rewatching Keith Floyd’s first-ever TV series in the UK, Floyd on Fish, made in 1985 with a focus largely on cooking British seafood. Apart from one particularly confusing episode where he and a young Rick Stein cook shark steaks to be served with a curious sweet and sour sauce, the narrative thread when it comes to the seafood that should be celebrated and eaten, or best avoided for reasons of sustainability, are largely as we would find them today.
Hake? Go for it, a fine fish with plentiful stocks; Langoustine and crabs? Hell yes, especially spider crabs, which are wonderful when in season, we should eat more of them, if possible, as most of what we fish from our waters is immediately exported to our more discerning neighbours in Europe; Oysters? go for your life; Mussels? is there a finer choice, especially the farmed chaps as, being bivalves, they filter our waters as a byproduct of just being alive, and the growing and harvesting does almost no damage, leaving cleaner water behind them then they found when they arrive; Mackerel? so good for you, so delicious and completely sustainable especially when line-caught. This was the party line 45 years ago, and is basically the advised line still today.
So what’s the problem? Well, we all want smoked salmon and prawns, don’t we, that's the problem. We Brits seem incapable of forming habitual addictions to the things that are in abundance locally. Although we used to manage it, as evidenced by our large historic consumption of oysters, kippers, sprats, etc. We are voracious culinary magpies, though, we want what they’re having, and we want it now. Above and beyond that, however, we just don’t seem to have a culture of savouring and respecting seafood, which as an island nation, seems deliberately obtuse.
I suppose it’s all quite expensive, isn’t it? Except for the bits that get battered and breadcrumbed, we can afford those, and some of the tinned stuff is useful to have in the cupboard, but all of that, in reality, should be quite rightly on the list marked ‘do not buy.’
If I visit my local fishmonger, which I don’t do enough, everything is £20-30 per kilogram. In order to cook for a couple of mates with fish as the centrepiece, I’ll be in for £40-50 before I’ve even visited the greengrocer, let alone the off-licence. My local supermarket has some bits and pieces of salmon and cod, vacuum packed in plastic, or a freezer section with relatively cheap prawns flown in from Thailand, Argentina, India, Honduras and Greenland (when I last checked) or some frozen tuna steaks from (worryingly non-specifically) the Pacific, Atlantic & Indian Oceans. There is some British Hake in the freezer aisle, but it is an outlier in its virtuosity, the exception that proves the rule.
My mum lives on the East Kent coast in Deal. The fishmonger on her high street is wonderful and buys plenty of what is landed by local day boats - so far so sustainable - but stood in the queue there last weekend, the majority of requests that came from the sweet supportive patrons were for monkfish, salmon, and tuna loin. The display was full of seafood labelled as locally caught; bass, mullet, lobster, crabs and mussels amongst them.
That we should eat less meat, for both dietary and sustainability matters, is widely acknowledged, accepted, and pleasingly frequently adopted now. That we should eat more fish as part of a healthy diet, similarly so. But how do we knit both things together?
I love fish but I far too rarely buy it and cook it at home. The lack of a really good local fishmonger coupled with the closing of the fish counter in my nearest supermarket has left me with the pre-packaged nonsense, discussed above, that is damaging to the planet on almost every metric, be it packaging, farming methodology, carbon footprint, etc. So instead I buy another aubergine and make another Szechuan stew or baked parmigiana or pasta a la norma for supper.
As the cost of living crises looms terrifyingly large, with my energy bills tripling in a few weeks, with Brexit and war and the pandemic all having, or primed to have upward pressure on everything that I buy, does that leave good fish and seafood as a once-upon-a-time-ago luxury, another commodity that becomes the preserve of the have-lots, out of reach of the have-much-lesses? Our seas have been overfished and we don’t seem to care much for the stuff we do catch, so maybe that’s not the end of the world? It does seem a shame though, doesn’t it, to not make the most of the natural bounty we can sustainably catch in our seas.
I want to try and think differently about eating seafood, especially on a budget, and as such, below are three unique takes on readily available, good value and completely delicious seafood dishes: seafood cocktail, crab souffle, and whole fish cooked in newspaper, a triumph of old school British cookery that in any other nation would be given a very fancy-sounding name indeed.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Cartouche to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.