Make the Fish

I grew up in New England, so fish was never exotic. It was Tuesday.

My father is also a sushi obsessive and started us on it before I was two, which means I have no memory of a time when raw fish was unusual or when ordering it felt like a decision. That's lucky and I know it, because for a lot of people fish sits in the same category as a tasting menu: something other people make for you, in a building you go to.

That's the thing I want to argue with.

The restaurant list

There's a short list of foods that people almost never make and almost always order. Fish is on it. So is Italian, which I'll come back to another time, because the idea that pasta is restaurant food is one of the strangest things we've collectively agreed on.

The list has nothing to do with difficulty. It's about confidence. These are foods where people have had a very good version somewhere else, and the gap between that memory and what they imagine they'd produce feels too wide to attempt.

So they order it. And the version they get is often two days older than what they could have bought that morning.

Fresher at home, genuinely

A restaurant buys fish, keeps it, and serves it over a few days. That's normal and well handled and it's still a few days.

You can buy a fillet at eleven and eat it at seven. Nobody held it for you. Nobody decided it was still fine. There's no part of the chain between the counter and your pan.

For most food, restaurants have an advantage you can't match: equipment, stock made over three days, someone who has made that dish four thousand times. With fish, the main variable is freshness, and freshness is the one thing where you're actually ahead.

It's also the fastest thing you can cook

A fillet takes under ten minutes. Scallops take three. Mussels take seven. Crab legs take five and are already cooked.

Fish is the weeknight protein, and it's treated as the special-occasion one. That's exactly backwards and it's probably the most useful sentence in this piece.

The fishmonger

This is the part nobody mentions and it's genuinely one of the pleasures.

A good fish counter has somebody behind it who knows what came in that morning, what's worth buying today and what you should wait on. Ask what's good and you'll get a real answer, because unlike most retail, they have an opinion and it changes weekly.

Tell them what you're making. They'll cut it the way you need, pull the pin bones, give you the heads for stock, and tell you when the halibut will be better. Go twice and they'll remember you. Go ten times and you have a person.

That relationship is worth more than any recipe on this site. It's also disappearing, and the way to keep a fish counter in your town is to buy fish at it.

The fear is a real thing and it's small

Fish has one genuine difficulty: the window between done and overdone is narrow. That's it. That's the whole of it.

And it has two reliable answers. Brine it for ten minutes so it firms up and seasons through. Then either set a temperature and let a water bath do the deciding, or pull it thirty seconds before you think you should.

Everything else people are nervous about is noise. It won't smell up your house if you don't overcook it. You won't poison anyone. It isn't delicate in some mystical way that rewards experience you don't have yet.

One narrow window, two answers, and the rest is a very good dinner in nine minutes.

So make it

Buy something this week. Talk to whoever is behind the counter. Ask what came in.

It will be fresher than the restaurant version, it will take less time than almost anything else you cook, and the second time you do it you'll already be better at it.

Seafood is great. Seafood is a little scary. Seafood is worth it.