SQUID-U-LIKE

 

Just before Christmas a friend sent me an article from Esquire magazine titled “The Best Martinis in America, 2023.”  Some of these sound great, some sound a bit odd, and I’d say a fair proportion aren’t martinis at all, but I’m old school in these matters.

 

The oddest, to my mind, was the Dirty Pasta Water Martini (above), served at Fiorella in Philadelphia, which looks the article describes it like this: ‘Dirty pasta water is often referred to as liquid gold, that secret ingredient that gives pasta dishes a velvety texture. So it makes sense that it could be used for the same purpose in a martini. The heavily salted pasta water takes the place of vermouth in this martini. The only other ingredients are gin and olive brine, making for an incredibly food friendly martini. Try it with Fiorella’s five pomodoro spaghetti. —K.S.’  Well, I think I probably shan’t, but you go right ahead KS.

 

Which brings us to the Tentacle Martini which can be found in Feasting a book by Bompas and Parr, and a book that I still thumb through once in a while.  The Tentacle Martini looks like this:

 

It’s made with gin, green chartreuse and an octopus tentacle  ‘It came about when we only had gin, green chartreuse and a few octopus in the refrigerator.’  What a life these boys lead.

 

Well, I’m not a fan of chartreuse, and although I’m bigfan of octopus, what was in my fridge was squid. The Bompas and Parr recipe says ‘there’s so much alcohol in there it effectively cooks the tentacle’ but I was taking no chances and I blanched and chilled the tentacles before putting them in the drinks.  They looked like this (and I'm sure a better photographer could have made them look better):

 

So the Nicholson Tentacle Cocktail was born: gin, vermouth and squid.  I’d still say it wasn’t really a martini but you know, it tasted exactly like a martini with a squid tentacle in it.

ZEN AND THE ART OF ... JUST ABOUT ANYTHING YOU CARE TO MENTION

It’s never easy to come up with titles for books, and I imagine it’s even harder to come up with titles for food and cookery books.  It probably pays to have words such as comfort, organic, Mary Berry, in there but it’s no absolute guarantee of success. 

 

So you can imagine my delight when I found a book in my local ‘wayside library’ (it’s actually in the waiting room at the train station) titled How to Drink Wine Out Of Fish Heads While Cooking lobster in a Volkswagen Hub Cap attributed to Ziggy Zen, which may be an author or collective or really anything at all.

 

Obviously I was drawn by the mention of a Volkswagen, but I’m picturing a Beetle hub cap, which is small and shallow and I’d reckon that it would be impossible to cook a lobster in it: maybe you could boil an egg.

 

Some of the later, non-Beetle hub caps are downright permeable and wouldn’t hold as much as a glass of water.

 

Anyway, despite its problematic, zany and not thoroughly incomprehensible title, the book does indeed include some perfectly straightforward and easy seafood recipes: salmon and caviar pizza, steamed crab, ceviche, though they are given some rather baroque names – the ceviche is called Sloughing Sea.

 

However in keeping with the ironic aesthetic there are some wonderful pages of ‘Fish and Crustacean Identification,’ which look like this:

Cecilia and Elvis are my favourites.

 

Partly, though only partly, inspired by this we cooked some scallops, and since we just happened to have a couple of venison sausages to hand, the meal became a deer and scallop platter, and yeah there's a bit of rocket in there. But is there a recipe for that? Well who really needs one?

And then a couple of days later there was squid and samphire.  Again, who needs a recipe?

 

I imagine Nobody Needs A Recipe isn’t really a selling title for a cookbook. 

SUGAR MY SQUID

Since you probably aren’t going to ask, it’s ‘Jane Jane’ Prepared Rolled Squid,

made by the Shin Ho Sing Ocean Enterprise Company of Taiwan.

The ingredients are squid, sugar, salt, lactose, vinegar, red pepper and Preservative E200.

       Of these flavours the most dominant by miles is the sugar.  In general I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and I definitely don’t want my to squid to taste sugary, but in the name of orientalism I snaffled it down.  Ah international cuisine – bringing nations together.

OPTIMISM, MILD OBSESSION, AND SQUID

The other night I had some of the best squid I’ve ever tasted.  It was at a Japansee restaurant in London, called Fushan, in New Oxford Street.  It looked like this:

It was deep fried and coated in a spicy batter, and it was mostly tentacles, but I can’t really tell you what made it so special – just, you know, the crunchiness and the taste (of squid).

And it appeared on the menu like this:

Karaage, I now discover means “Chinese fry” in Japanese, which confuses matters a little, though only a little.

So next day, filled with optimism and mild obsession, I went into the local Waitrose looking for more squid that I’d cook myself.  There was some to be had and it was reduced, though it was just the tubes with no tentacles. I also don’t currently have a deep fat fryer, so the squid was pan fried with garlic, lemon and parsley, and it was perfectly fine but not fantastic.  Looked like this:

And then a couple of nights later in Efe’s in Brick Lane, I had squid breaded and deep-fried Turkish-style, and at this point it started to occur to me that maybe I only really like the tentacles.  They're certainly the bits that crisp up best.

And here is another less than fantastic squid dish that I had in Tokyo; a tube again, and filled with something inscrutable and really not all that appealing.  I’m sure regular readers will explain to me what’s going on here:

And then I thought about Thurston Moore and one of his early meetings with Mike Watt.  He quotes Watt saying, “All I eat is squid.  If I’m going to go to a booze joint, they’d better have squid. So he ordered all this squid and he was shoveling all this squid into his mouth.”  This is Thurston doing his impersonation of Watt eating squid – you can find the  interview, not all of it about squid, on Youtube.

This is Mike Watt apparently eating Euros.

THE CEPHALOPOD AND I

 My mention and picture of the squid a couple of posts back (as seen above) caused a certain amount of idle chat among the literati and fooderati, and indeed on my Facebook page. The thing I ate was actually listed on the menu as “huge squid” – an imprecise term to be sure, but even so it did evoke something a bit more kraken-like. 

Laura Miller offered the information that “The giant squid, or any deep-water-dwelling squid, would not be especially edible because of the high ammonia content in the flesh which allows them to survive at depths where the water pressure is very high.” And she then winsomely added, “This has been your daily pedantry interlude, over and out.”        

Jonathan Gold joined in and said, “I've had relatively giant squid - crudo cut from arcturus, about 45 pounds. It was actually tender and delicious. Not deep sea enough?”

               By then Laura had recalled an article in the New York Times from January 2013 about giant squid which asked, “Would you eat the giant squid if you could?" And then actually quoted Jonathan from that article, "I have had something like giant squid -- flash-grilled arcturus tentacle at Esca in Manhattan. But I draw the line at endangered or threatened species. There are a lot of other things in the world to eat.... The arcturus was delicious, by the way."

            




Mea   Meanwhile Tammy Fraser thought the picture of my squid was reminiscent of the sliced horse in the movie The Cell, which in turn was based on Damien Hirst’s various sliced-animals-as-art.  

         And I began to wonder whether all flesh should be served that way, sliced but then partially reassembled to reveal its initial form.  Didn't seem such a terrible idea, but then I encountered a real octopus.

I’ve cooked an octopus or two in my time, admittedly not a vast number, but when I found them on sale locally I snagged a couple.  Now, I know there’s a lot of malarkey about how you shouldn’t eat octopuses because they’re so smart, and of course I’ve seen the film of an octopus opening a jar.  But aren’t pigs even smarter?    I do see the issue here – I’m not a monster - and I can understand the argument that says you shouldn’t eat any living creature whatsoever.  But trying to base the morality of meat eating on the intelligence of the thing being eaten, just seems to be asking for trouble.  

There also seems to be a fair bit of malarkey talked about tenderizing octopus. I’ve certainly seen Greek fishermen slamming them on harborside rocks to tenderize them but I’ve always felt that was just displacement activity: these guys hate their job, hate their lives, hate the sea, so they take it out on a some octopus they’ve just stabbed with a spear. 

Anyway the current thinking is that the process of freezing is enough to do the tenderizing and it seemed to be the case with mine.  I dug out a recipe that said stew it in flavored stock for fifty minutes or so and it would be fine – and it was. But this rather alarming thing happened in the course of that cooking.  Whereas  pre-cooking it had looked like a plate of fish (in the picture two above), something amorphous and without personality: once cooked it looked much more like an actually “living” creature.  That head really disturbed me. 

The only thing to do was chop it up, sauté it and serve it with a kind of risotto.  The head remained uneaten however.    Like I said, I’m not a monster.