Eating for Beginners Read online

  But there was one thing going on in the back third of the room that I understood perfectly: a barter system, meat for pastry. While the rest of us were stealing bites here and there, August and Sarah had worked out their own trade deal. She handed him pieces of meat that were too small or too well-done or had been sitting around slightly too long after cooking, and he paid her back in kind. When I expressed my total approval of this agreement, Sarah confided, "Yesterday he gave me a quart of cookies. I was quite happy last night."

  Maybe I would get the knack of the grill after all.

  ***

  But after a few weeks there, during which I looked longingly toward the pastry station and wondered when I might get my cookie payoff, I was no closer to being able to do it all myself. Sarah was unfailingly kind to me as I bumbled braises and duck breasts and vegetarian everything.

  "How do you keep it all straight?" I asked as she flipped a few pieces of veal (I thought) and removed several others (it was actually pork). It all looked the same to me.

  "Gradually, the space becomes available in your head," she said, after thinking for a minute. "Something had to happen where I just let go and stopped worrying about keeping up with the pace of things. Just because there are more people doesn't mean they're eating faster."

  This made sense, and yet it was becoming clear that I did not have a grill brain. I was painfully slow and couldn't seem to reach the same state of mindless concentration I had achieved at the fish station. I was trying to do what Sarah said—think about efficiency, memorize the menu so I wouldn't waste time looking at it every time a dish was ordered in—but it didn't happen.

  The weeks ticked by, and the new year was almost upon us. I arrived one afternoon to find that the window boxes in front of the restaurant had been planted with small fir trees. It was forty degrees outside, and I could tell there had been a fire in the fireplace the night before. It was my wedding anniversary, and I intended to spend the evening cooking and then leave a bit early with some delicious snacks to take home to Noah.

  But first, more confusion at the grill. That night my main problem was pork—specifically, getting my slices of pork to lie neatly on the mound of braised pork and green lentils I had made in the center of the plate. I was splashing juices everywhere, and as Sarah cleaned up my mess she suggested, "Challenge yourself on the next plate. Fewer motions."

  "Okay," I said.

  But my spoon was unsteady and I scooped and splashed even more. The slightest hesitation threw the whole process off, and once that happened it was hard to right things again.

  And that was just the plating. My visit to Lydia's farm had clarified my ideas about what meat to eat and why, but it had not made me feel better about cooking meat at the restaurant. It had not made me feel better about plunging my hand into a pan of oil over and over again. Or stretching my forearms across the grill to reach something at the back that was cooking in a place so hot I had to take my wedding ring off before reaching for it or the ring got so hot that it left a red mark on the flesh underneath. Pretty much nothing was going to make me feel better about that. I was tired of the grill, and as Jules had taken to saying when he was mad about something, I didn't want it.

  I begged off early, pleading marital festivities at home. On my way down the block in the freezing cold, loaded with cheeses and pâtés and other celebratory food David had heaped on me and refused to let me pay for, I realized two rather amazing things. I had been married eight years. And I missed the fish station.

  No-Grill Pork Tenderloin with Balsamic Vinegar

  (loosely adapted from Marcella Hazan)

  2 tablespoons butter

  1 tablespoon vegetable oil

  2 pork tenderloins (about 1½–2 pounds total)

  salt

  freshly ground black pepper

  ½ cup good red wine vinegar

  3 bay leaves (optional)

  1. Put a heavy pot (enameled works well) on a burner over medium heat and add the butter and vegetable oil.

  2. Once the butter foams (do not let it turn brown), add the meat and brown well on all sides, turning it to get good browning everywhere. Turn down the burner to medium low and salt and pepper the meat.

  3. Add the balsamic vinegar and the bay leaves if you're using them. Loosen any crusty bits from the bottom of the pot, bring the liquid to a simmer, then cover the pot tightly and cook for about 20–30 minutes, turning the meat occasionally.

  4. When the meat is tender (test with a fork) remove it from the pot, keep it warm, and let it rest.

  5. Add ½ cup of water to the juices in the pot, plus a bit more balsamic vinegar if you wish, then scrape any remaining bits from the bottom, turn up the heat, and reduce the liquid.

  6. Slice the meat and serve with the reduced pan juice.

  Serves 4 as a main dish.

  13. Out to Sea

  BY MIDWINTER I accepted my fate and abandoned the grill for good. David had once told me that different personalities go better with different stations, and by now it was clear that I should throw my lot in with the fish. Which meant, of course, that I needed to learn how to handle whole fish, not just pre-cut portions of flesh ready to hit the frying pan. I started small, with fifty sardines that glistened beneath my fingers like sleek jewels. One cold afternoon David sent me down to the walk-in to bring up a box of them, and when I saw them shining on their bed of ice, I felt inspired. I had always leapt at the chance to order sardines in restaurants, but never dared to buy them whole at the fish store for fear of ruining them with my ignorance. I knew so little about cleaning fish that I couldn't imagine where to begin. (And being married to Noah, who had gutted every one of those fish he caught on his spear as a kid, didn't help me learn since he always stepped in when fish needed cleaning.) Bringing the box into the kitchen, mindful of Sarah's advice to challenge myself, I asked David to show me how to clean just one sardine before leaving me on my own with the remaining forty-nine.

  Following his example, I placed one on my cutting board (which I had stuck to the counter with wet paper towels like a pro) and began to scrape off the scales, little incandescent medallions, with the back of a small knife. They flew everywhere as I swept the knife in the opposite direction of their growth, covering my counter top with a mother-of-pearl sheen. Underneath them, the fish skin was unexpectedly gorgeous, like silver leather shot through with gold on the sides, fading into a shimmering blue-black ridge along the back.

  When all forty-nine were scaled, I slit them along their bellies one by one and pulled out the insides, a small tangle of red and brown and green. Once prepped, they would go into a fish box and into the lowboy at the fish station. They would be served that night, sautéed whole with Meyer lemon jam and caper butter.

  "Where did these come from?" I asked David as I gutted. "Are they farmed?"

  Fish farms are one of the ways in which we're trying to compensate for the overfishing that has already taken place in all of the world's oceans, but they're an imperfect solution. As Charles Clover writes in The End of the Line, "Farmed fish have the same problems amplified by unnatural confinement that intensively bred livestock do. They need drugs to treat illnesses and pesticides to kill parasites. They lead brief, sedentary lives like other domesticated creatures. They are fed with ground-up smaller fish, which are often themselves overfished. This concentrates the pollution present in the sea in the fatty tissues of the farmed fish (as eating smaller fish does naturally in the flesh of larger, longer-lived predatory fish).... For this reason the conservation of wild fish is a human health issue as well as an environmental one." Or, as Mark Bittman puts it, "Farm-raised fin fish are really the cage-raised chickens of the sea."

  At the moment it's generally agreed by experts like these that clams and mussels and oysters, which live on plankton and can be harvested without damaging the environment, are just about the only good farmed options. American tilapia and a few other fish that don't eat wild-fish feed and can be raised inland, where they won't harm c
oastal vegetation, are also okay, though issues of flavor come up with them.

  At applewood, David buys only wild fish that have been caught sustainably, subscribing to Clover's idea that "given the choice, most of us would prefer to eat wild fish. So it is rational to consume wild fish in a way that promotes their continued abundance." Accordingly, David's answer to my question about the sardines was: "They're from the Mediterranean Sea, not farmed." When I asked why they came from so far away, he explained that when it comes to "promoting abundance," local is less important to him than sustainable because the destruction of ocean life and habitats is already so advanced. He was more willing to buy seafood from Alaska or Spain that had been fished responsibly than seafood that came from a shorter distance away but was overfished or in danger of becoming so, or that had a high level of by-catch—the name for fish that are accidentally swept up with target fish and then thrown back into the water, usually dead. (That said, applewood is also always looking for good local food, and soon after this conversation David began buying sardines from Maine rather than from the Mediterranean.)

  Every day David gets an email from his fishmonger that lists, much in the manner of the Angello's weekly email, which fish is available, where it's from, and how it was caught. Generally speaking, hook and line is the most commonly used environmentally friendly way of fishing. It allows fishermen to keep only the fish they're after, and to throw back anything else immediately, while it's still alive. Traps and pots used to catch lobsters, shrimp, and bottom-dwelling fish are also considered fairly safe, though they can cause some habitat damage, and the same goes for gill nets, which have different sizes of netting to allow fish other than the targeted species to swim through unharmed (though gill nets do produce some by-catch and can entangle marine mammals and sea turtles). Worst in terms of both environment and by-catch are methods like trawling and dredging, which literally tear up the ocean floor and also catch a lot of unwanted fish, and purse seining, which involves scooping out whole schools of fish at once. (Purse seining was the method that provoked such public outcry about tuna because so many dolphins were swept up in the netting with schools of tuna.)

  If David wants to order fish on a given day, after checking the email he calls the fishmonger's outgoing message machine, which gives him last-minute updates on weather and fishing conditions that might change availability. Then he cross-checks any fish he wants to buy against the online Seafood Watch list put out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and makes his order.

  Even though David buys from all over, a great deal of applewood's fish, depending on the season, comes from fairly close by. As spring rolled in and the weather finally began to warm up, I drove to Barnegat Light, New Jersey, to bring my fish obsession to its natural conclusion: a day on the open sea.

  On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I headed south to the very tip of Long Beach Island. I had made arrangements to stay in a motel right near the docks and get picked up at two-forty-five A.M. on Monday by Kevin Wark, a Barnegat Light native and a dayboat gill-net fisherman, who supplied fish to the company applewood ordered from. What was one more sleepless night? After a dinner of local fish and chips, I went to bed at ten, my green galoshes at the ready by the door of my motel room.

  At exactly two-forty-five, as I was pulling them on (I had already swallowed my Dramamine and put on some wristbands that were supposed to prevent seasickness through pressure points), there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find Kevin, big and broad and tan with shaggy brown hair, sun-bleached blond on the top layer, that made him look far younger than his forty-five years. He was wearing jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt, along with a pair of sunglasses on top of his head. It was pitch-black outside, but I took the glasses as a hopeful sign.

  "Hey, nice to meet you," he said, grabbing my duffel bag. "My truck's right outside."

  After a quick ride in his pickup, we arrived at the docks and walked out a lamp-lit dock to his boat, a forty-two-foot lobster boat called the Dana Christine. "I named it after my little girl," he explained, hopping down to the deck and holding out his hand to me. "She's nine." As I jumped on after him he continued happily, "It's very seaworthy. It can take some weather and you don't have to worry about it coming apart. It can take more than you can." (In retrospect, this was a statement to which I should have paid closer attention.)

  In the small cabin, I wedged myself onto the narrow bench under the side window and Kevin started flipping switches on pieces of equipment. There was a round green radar screen with concentric circles that looked like a target and showed everything within about six miles of the Dana Christine. There was also another kind of radar, black and white, called a chromoscope, that showed the depth of the ocean. And there were various other gauges and needles that monitored the engine and the gas tank. We were going to steam fifty-two miles out to sea to the monkfishing grounds where Kevin and Mike, his deckhand, had put out their nets the day before. We had to leave early to have enough time to reach the fishery, pull in the nets, get back to the dock, and unload the fish before the marina closed at five o'clock that afternoon. The trip out would be fast in order to get to work as soon as possible in case there was lost gear or we had to visit more than one fishing ground. "We're going to burn a gallon of fuel for every mile," Kevin sighed. "And right now that costs me about eight hundred dollars." The return trip would be slower to save fuel. A gallon per mile sounded like a lot of fuel to me, but actually, when compared with the amount of fuel burned per ton of fish caught by a large-scale commercial fishing boat, it's very little. According to the Sea Around Us Project, which investigates the impact of fishing on marine ecosystems, small fishing boats catch about twenty-four million metric tons of fish per year using between one and three million metric tons of fuel, while big ships not only use far more fuel (fourteen to nineteen million metric tons) to get a similar amount of fish (twenty-nine million tons) but also use destructive trawlers and produce ten to twenty million tons of by-catch.

  Kevin's monkfish permit, issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), allowed him twenty-seven "days at sea" with a limit of three thousand pounds of monkfish per trip. If we didn't get back in time to unload the fish that afternoon, he'd have to unload it the next morning, losing a day of fishing and the income from the fish he might have caught. One of the arguments against this system, which many environmentalists want changed, is that it encourages fishermen to fish very aggressively on their few permitted days, which is hard on the fisheries and can result in large numbers of fish—anything over the weight limit—being thrown back into the water as by-catch. For Kevin, it also had other shortcomings. "If it's slow you don't want to go out there and waste your time," he explained. "You'll kill yourself financially. It's a real juggling act to try to hit everything just right, and if you make a mistake you're screwed." He spent the dead winter months, February and March, when no fish were running, making sure his nets and his boat and his radar were well-prepared. "You just spend buckets full of money trying to fix everything that you possibly think's going to fail. You just rehab. It's a war of attrition during the season."

  Just then Mike appeared in the cabin door. He was forty, but, like Kevin, looked younger, and he had curly red hair. They had known each other most of their lives, and Mike had worked for Kevin for fourteen years. Mike had untied the boat when he got on, and after introducing himself quickly, went down to the sleeping area under the prow, where he stowed his lunch in a corner and then curled up under a sleeping bag on one of the thin mattresses to get some rest.

  "There's no bathroom on board," Kevin said cheerfully as the boat made a sputtering sound and moved away from the dock. "If you need to go, just tell me and I'll give you a bucket." And then we were off, out into the vast ocean.

  When we reached open water, Kevin gunned the engine and we started clipping along at sixteen knots (about seventeen miles) an hour. Through the window next to my perch, I could see nothing but blackness—I couldn't even tell where the sky ended
and the water began—punctuated occasionally by the bobbing light of a buoy. The stars were spread all across the sky, and the purring of the engine combined with the sound of the boat pushing through the water was incredibly soothing.

  Out on the water, Kevin became talkative, and I was glad to listen. "I built my first boat when I was thirteen," he said, checking the green screen, which now looked intergalactic, pocked with blips that showed buoys and other boats. "If you needed money, you went out," he added. "We sold crabs in the neighborhood to the tourists, we sold minnows, and we sold clams to my grandfather. He had a clam house. My dad was an electrician, not a commercial fisherman, but we always had boats and I always knew I was going to go fishing. I remember being a little kid seeing the commercial boats go by and thinking, 'I've got to get on that and see what's going on.' That's what we did after school, we went out in the bay. I have an older brother who was a clammer for years. I have a little brother that fishes. There was no transition for me. It just seemed like that's what we were born to do."

  He was quiet for a minute, then spoke again. "I think we're a dying breed, though. I don't think there will be another generation of fishermen. You don't see too many young people getting into the business. It's so expensive to get into, and permits are so expensive, anywhere from thirty-five to a hundred thousand dollars, depending on the size and horsepower of the boat. It was three hundred sixty-five thousand dollars for an unequipped boat I saw in Maine last summer."