The River Cottage Fish Book: The Definitive Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Fish and Shellfish (River Cottage Cookbook) - Hardcover

Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh; Fisher, Nick

 
9781607740056: The River Cottage Fish Book: The Definitive Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Fish and Shellfish (River Cottage Cookbook)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1607740052 ISBN 13: 9781607740056
Verlag: TEN SPEED PR, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

The formidable River Cottage team turns their attention to all matters aquatic in this definitive guide to freshwater fish, saltwater fish, and shellfish. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Nick Fisher examine the ecological and moral issues of fishing, teach individual skills such as catching and descaling, and offer a comprehensive (and fascinating) species reference section. They also demystify the cooking of fish with 135 recipes for preparing fish and shellfish in diverse ways, from pickling to frying to smoking.
 
This ambitious reference-cookbook appeals to both intellect and appetite by focusing on the pleasures of catching, cooking, and eating fish while grounding those actions in a philosophy and practice of sustainability. The authors help us understand the human impact on the seafood population, while their infectious enthusiasm for all manner of fish and shellfish—from the mighty salmon to the humble mackerel to the unsung cockle—inspires us to explore different and unfamiliar species. Fish is superlative food, but it’s also a precious resource. The River Cottage Fish Book delivers a complete education alongside a wealth of recipes, and is the most opinionated and passionate fish book around.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL is a renowned British broadcaster, writer, farmer, educator, and campaigner for sustainably produced food. He has written eight books, including The River Cottage Meat Book, the 2008 James Beard Cookbook of the Year. Hugh established the River Cottage farm in rural Dorset, England, in 1998.
 
NICK FISHER is a leading fish authority and journalist who has created and presented television and radio shows on fishing. He lives in Dorset with his family, a lake full of trout, and several boats.

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Introduction
 
We both love fish. And that is the overriding reason we have written this book. As anglers, cooks, and (very amateur) naturalists, we’ve got fish under our skin. It’s very hard – and rather stressful – to imagine life without them.
 
Over the years we’ve found all kinds of ways to scratch our fish itch: goldfish in a bowl, visits to aquariums, goggling at Jacques Cousteau on the telly, learning first to snorkel and then to scuba dive. Such enthusiasms have come and gone, but two have always been a constant: catching fish and eating them.
 
Between us, we have caught and cooked many fish. We have, of course, also caught a fair few that we haven’t cooked, and cooked countless others that we haven’t caught. But we are happiest when these two pursuits collide and we get to consume a fish that we have personally pulled from the deep. For both of us, our passion for fish as quarry and food began at an early age.
 
Hugh’s first fishing expedition occurred at the age of six, when his dad took him to a stream in Richmond Park, armed with a bamboo cane, a length of string, a bent pin, and a slice of bread. They actually caught a fish! Back home with his Observer’s Book of Fishes, Hugh identified the catch as a mackerel, noting that this was a fish that was meant to live in the sea.
 
Being omniscient, his dad naturally had a convincing explanation: “Er, it must have decided to swim up from the sea – like a salmon . . .” That was more than good enough for the young Hugh. There was no reason to be suspicious. After all, he had lifted the fish from the stream with his own hands, and watched his father knock it several times on the head with his own eyes.
 
Hugh’s mum fried the mackerel in butter and served it with a slice of lemon. It was the first fish Hugh had ever eaten that wasn’t finger shaped, coated in bread crumbs, and doused in ketchup – and he enjoyed it very much indeed.
 
It was ten years before the sorry truth came out. Seeing his teenage son swearing blind to some disbelieving friends that he had once caught a mackerel in a London park with a lump of Mother’s Pride on a bent pin, Hugh’s dad was moved to a guilty confession. He came clean about the trip to the fishmonger’s; the sleight of hand that slipped the fish onto the hook as Hugh was sent behind a bush for a much-needed pee; the ritual dispatch of a fish that had, in fact, already been dead for two days . . .
 
Hugh was a little disillusioned to discover the deceit but, being sixteen, soon found other things to strop about. In the end he is, of course, eternally grateful to his dad. Grateful to be hooked on fishing, and hooked on fish.


1. Understanding fish
 
The nitty-gritty of this book is the delightful activity of cooking and eating fish. And we think you’ll derive even more pleasure from your fish and shellfish if you understand a little, or perhaps a lot, about the business of catching and preparing them.
 
Besides being delicious, fish are uniquely nutritious. So you would think the very least we could do, given their contribution to our well-being, would be to nurture them in return. At this we are failing spectacularly. The prognosis is gloomy on a number of fronts, as the destructive fishing practices of the past half-century have taken their toll. The fact that we can finally acknowledge just how bad things are does offer, paradoxically, a glimmer of hope. We haven’t, thank goodness, passed the point of no return; we still have a stunning range of native fish and shellfish to celebrate. We would both argue that their future lies largely in the hands of the consumer – that’s every single one of us who loves to eat fish.
 
The angler-cook will, of necessity, prepare much of his or her fish from scratch, and knowing how to wield a filleting knife is clearly essential. But even the landlubber fish enthusiast may once in a while enjoy taking a live crab home or gutting a mackerel at the sink. Our two chapters covering fish and shellfish skills will show you the way.
 
Four million years ago, an early prototype of the human being, australopithecine man, roamed across the African savannah. He walked upright, stood around 4 feet (1.2m) tall and possessed a brain about the size of a chimp’s. Three million years later, on the verge of extinction, he hadn’t changed much. Despite a few hundred thousand generations of hunting and eating meat, Australopithecus remained pretty much as intellectually and vertically challenged as he had been when he first wandered out onto the plain. He lost the battle for survival – and became just another leaf to have fallen from the evolutionary tree.
 
Another human forerunner, who overlapped with Australopithecus for the last million years of his time on the planet, was Homo erectus. He grew over 5 feet (1.5m) tall, and in just 200,000 years of evolution he tripled the size of his brain. Equipped with this enlarged gray matter and a range of tools, erectus evolved into sapiens. Hom sap was anatomically modern and technologically minded; in other words, he was us.
 
Why did one branch of protohumans hit an evolutionary dead end while another grew bigger, stronger, and – crucially – much cleverer? What made one a hopeless, doomed grunter and the other the ancestor of Leonardo da Vinci (plus you and us, of course). The answer is fish.
 
Homo erectus stood up, but he didn’t stand still. He wandered all over the place, in search of a better living; he left the savannah and reached the coast, where he ate fish, shellfish, and seaweed for the first time (they must have made a nice change from mastodons – so much easier on the teeth). Fossil evidence shows that his burgeoning fish-eating habit coincided with his rapid cerebral growth. Scientists believe this staggering improvement came about because Homo sapiens was nourished by a substance previously present only in trace quantities in his diet: docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA for short. Our bodies aren’t able to manufacture their own DHA, so how did it end up inside them? It must have been something we ate. When it comes to identifying the “superfood” that provided the quantities of DHA necessary for the dramatic expansion of our cranial capacity, the only serious candidate is fish.
 
DHA is an omega-3 essential fatty acid, of the kind we now know to be vital to brain development. The body converts it into proteins, which it uses specifically to build neurons – the conductors that manage electrochemical activity in the brain. Up to 8 percent of our brain weight is made up of these fatty acids, so to achieve optimal brain growth we need fatty acids in our food. Put simply, the more of them we get, the better our brains develop. And there’s nowhere better
to get them than from fish.
 
So if it hadn’t been for early man’s trip to the seaside, we might all still be hairy bush dwellers, waiting for someone to invent the wheel (or at least the fish spear). Of course, we should remember that we didn’t become piscivores in order to evolve. We weren’t quite that clever. We ate fish because they were there, they sustained us, and perhaps because we found them delicious. It just so happens that, from a biological and evolutionary perspective, actively choosing to eat something that is so good for you makes for a fantastically virtuous circle. One that has led, down the millennia, to a culture of such stupendous sophistication that books have been written and television shows filmed about our...

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Verlag
TEN SPEED PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1607740052
ISBN 13 
9781607740056
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
608
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Verantwortliche Person
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