Open Writing

You know how it is. You see it, estimate its value, you can’t believe it is so cheap, you buy it, and afterwards have leisure to wonder what the ‘blummin’ ummer’ you got it for! It lies there in the freezer, its cold dead eyes challenging you to do something with it.

Weeks pass and all kinds of recipes flow through your mind for the full size Pacific Salmon, the result of your latest reckless attack of impulse buying. "Well," you tell your inner voice, "It was so reasonable!"

In addition to its well-focused dead eyes burning into your guilty soul, its upturned mouth cruelly sneers its silent but grammatically perfect question, "Who caught whom, sucker?" The honest answer is too painful to verbalise, so you sneer back unconvincingly and close the freezer door, leaving your ‘catch’ in the dark. That’s the best response you can come up with at short notice. It is gone from sight, but it is not forgotten.

Your desk disappears under a pile of recipes for fresh, if frozen, salmon, none of which have in them any of the ingredients resident in your pantry or spice rack. The Web search produced an incredible 735,000 recipes for the mighty fish, which you are compelled to print, but none of them appeal to your cod-based sensibilities.

All you want is a simple recipe that will cook a two-foot long trophy denizen stolen out of the cool blue deep that washes about to the left-hand side of America.

Just when all seems lost, you stumble across a recipe that is simple enough for you to deal with and for which you have the makings: a square yard of industrial strength aluminium foil, some sea salt, the remains of a jar of crushed garlic, a pound of butter, a plastic lemon whose contents are suspiciously cloudy, and some spices left over from the ones gifted to you by the Walkers four years back in Old Tennessee.

Several more weeks pass as you wait for an opportune moment to do a Jamie Oliver while feeling like a Gordon Ramsey! It is amazing what a long-dead salmon can do even to the equilibrium of a saint-in-waiting!

Finally, you can delay no longer and clear the kitchen worktops for your assault on your frozen friend. He does not quite fit into your microwave oven, so you thaw him at an angle.

The incongruity of seeing your bargain, who is rapidly assuming the guise of your enemy, reclining at an angle not found in any cook book with the glass turntable skidding round under him, adds more painful twinges to your conscience. If he could move under his own steam, you tell yourself, you would run him to the Californian coast and set him free!

It is an idle thought, and the ‘Peep, peep, peep,’ of the oven brings you back to your senses before you actually go out and warm up the four-by-four for a quick three hour run to Santa Monica to ‘Free Willy,’ as you have come to call the melting giant. Somehow, it humanises him, making him seem less hostile.

You retrieve the ‘fish that leaps’ from the oven, and let him measure his length on the chopping board, chop of his head with three hacks of your cleaver, each strike of which lands in a different place but gets the job done.

Next, you slosh him about in a salt-water-filled sink, from where you retrieve him and pat him dry with not a little affection, rather as you pat your dog dry after having given him a bath that he obviously did not enjoy.

You begin to warm to your victim, perhaps engendered by shame and sympathy for having decapitated him.

You lay him on the foil, butter him well, stuff his gaping cavity with garlic and lemon juice, and fasten him tight in his metallic shroud before committing his body to the oven.

Some misunderstanding about the heat and duration of his ovenic incarceration, probably due to the water drops in your misty eyes, brings him back to the scope of your attention when the smoke alarm goes off!

You remove your Pacific pet from the hot-box just as the dogs, thinking that the kitchen is about to set on fire again, hit the doggie door at great speed and side-by-side. Your partner announces an unusual decision to go for a walk and leaves immediately without further explanation. Now it’s just you and him.

After a period of cooling, you peel back the sheet and discover that your silver prize has become charcoal over its exterior, although the inside is steaming pink flesh that smells like dinner. Yet there is something of a sea change overtaken you as you ministered to your treasure, and all hunger has fled and taken your interest in gourmet seafood with it.

Soon it is time to feed the dogs that returned with their ears flat and their tails tucked tight between their hind legs. "It is time I treated them," you say to yourself, spotting an out from your dilemma of actually having to devour an animal for whom you have developed so many discrete and ambivalent feelings, that you fear treading on your sympathies even as you enjoy your gluttony.

You boned the resplendent creature, then divided it between the doggie bowls as your four-footed canine charges, faces upturned, pulsated with drooling pink tongues in anticipation of the coming banquet.

What has taken you months to get yourself into the state of mind to turn into a comestible, and hours to actually prepare and cook off, is despatched by your furry children in less than two minutes. You breathe a sigh of relief and order in a pizza.

This is not fiction, and I know because it happened to me. Since that time I only buy fish that fit my pans, bear a striking resemblance to cod, and have had the heads removed.

I passed the fishmonger’s stall the other day and noted the presence of the brothers of my former fish. There were three of them, side-by-side, bright-eyed, looking straight at me, and grinning from gill to gill! They were marked down to a real bargain price.

I remembered, turned vegan for the day, bought a tub of chocolate mint ice cream, and headed straight for the checkout!

Copyright © 2005 – Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED