Читать книгу Fresh and Wild Cookbook: A Real Food Adventure - Ysanne Spevack - Страница 25

Big squids, ready to have their tentacles removed and cooked. Their handy ink sacs hidden inside their strange blobby bodies, waiting to be pierced and the black liquid dripped into homemade pasta mixes. These guys really are the B-movie stars of the fish counter.

Of course, the A-list fish counter celebs have to be the guys that know how to prepare the fish and seafood ready for your dinner. It takes years of practice and innate flair to be able to de-tube, de-tentacle and clean up squids. So I’m not going to attempt a ‘here’s how you do it’ paragraph – simply ask your friendly Fresh & Wild fishmonger to sort it out for you, then get it home and into the pan.

If your local store is the Notting Hill shop, chances are the tentacle chopper extraordinaire will be Jeff Rotheram. He’s totally committed to widening your enjoyment of fish and he’ll happily guide you through the more unusual guys on the ice between you and him. Jeff has been a fishmonger for over 25 years and can tell you where the fish on his counter are from, why he likes them and practically what their mothers were called. Before arriving at Fresh & Wild, Jeff worked at Harvey Nichols and before that at a fantastic Cornish fish wholesaler, so he can help you out with your dinner choices, no problem.

Unlike squid, salchichón is easy – just get it out of the packet or ask the deli counter lady to cut you some. Et voilà. Salchichón is a very traditional cured sausage, originally from the town of Cantimpalos in Segovia, but with regional variations now from every part of Spain. It’s a bit like chorizo, which also comes from this town, but is thinner and longer, with more garlic and less paprika, and is dried into a U shape. Catalan salchichón has black pepper in it, while salchichón from the town of Vic in the Pyrenees is thicker than most, at about 5cm instead of 3–4cm.

As with most cured salamis and saucissons, a lot of pork fat goes into this dried sausage along with the pork, so go easy on the butter for this recipe.

You only need a tiny bit of butter to get the sausage started. After that, its own fat will melt and provide enough to fry itself and the squid.

Talking of pork fat, don’t forget that all mammals store the more toxic elements from their bodies in their fat. If you want to eat piggy fat from animals that have been raised in concrete sties without any windows – animals that wade about knee deep in pig poo, attacking each other and constantly getting diseases – then go for it. Personally, I’d stick to eating organic pigs, who are raised with access to fresh air and sunlight, and enjoy a lot more freedom to roam, less crowded quarters to live in, and are only given veterinary drugs if they get sick, rather than as a preventative measure. And that means using organic salchichón in this lovely lunch dish.

The dulse for this recipe comes fresh from seas off the coast of France. It plays a delicate supporting role to the Cornish squid and is a really great local sea vegetable that’s as mineral-rich as some dried Japanese sea veg.

All in all, this is an extremely quick lunch dish that’s full of the freshest sea flavours, plus a special bit of extra meaty spice.