Entre Les Murs

Marco Dorade

Recent posts have talked a lot about the food and drink we've been enjoying, and I fear presenting the house-husband view as my only perspective; however we have been entertaining a bit lately and with Janet up to her eyeballs in Turkey it's up to me to get the food to the table. There's little to report about job-hunting or French class at the moment, but I'm sure this current domestic phase will end all too soon.

This is apropos of our latest entertaining episode, in which S, an erstwhile colleague of Janet's in town for a couple of days on business, came for Sunday dinner. I selected a recipe for Red Snapper, made a list of ingredients, and headed off for the usual Sunday morning market trip. The problem is that the names of fish are totally different from the English, may vary greatly depending on whether the same fish was caught in the Atlantic or Mediterranean, and cannot always be found in a French/English dictionary. I did my research this time, and I looked up a picture of a Red Snapper in my Book of Ingredients (thanks, mum). Nonetheless, after canvassing every fish stall in the market, I was all at sea : there was nothing labelled anything like what the dictionary translated "snapper" to be (lutjanidé), and the only fish that looked the right shape, called Dorade, wasn't red. I asked a couple of the fishmongers for their help, but they didn't know the English any better than I knew the French. One agreed that the Dorade might be it, because it also comes in a red-hued version (Rose Dorade, which nobody had either); but it was larger than I expected a Red Snapper to be - and of course, it wasn't red. After more dithering, and with the fishmongers by this time closing up around me, I elected to grab a Dorade. This was rapidly trimmed of its fins and scaled for me (do you have to scale Red Snapper?) and wrapped up for twelve euros, "un cadeau" I was informed.

At home I was confronted with further problems, since how do you cook a fish when you don't even know what it is? I surfed the net for insights (and recipes) but couldn't entirely confirm one way or the other that I didn't have a red snapper, although I was left with the impression that the only relationship this fish had to the intended main dish was a pronounced forehead. The recipe I had originally selected called for frying, and Marco (as I had dubbed him by the evening) wouldn't fit in our largest stove-top pan. So, tap dancing like mad and trying to keep Janet and our guest out of the chaotic kitchen with hors d'ouevres and wine, I adapted (made up) the recipe and baked him under foil. He barely fit in our modest oven.

In the end, the kitchen gods smiled. I served Marco, his vacant smile tightened to a dark grimace in the oven, on a bed of couscous, flavoured with Morrocan spices from Bon Marché, and he was absolutely succulent: moist, juicy and flavourful. S, fighting jet lag, was scintillating company. She had provided dessert, a chocolatey confection procured at a patisserie en route from her hotel. And, furthermore, she absolutely insisted on helping with the dishes. Now that's a good guest.

posted 28.11.05