Feasting on fish
- Apr 20
- 7 min read
"It can be impressive to serve fewer dishes, but in larger quantitites - it provides a great sense of abundance." Guy Grossi
It's lucky dip time, and this is the dish in question - Pesce arrosto - and you won't find this particular recipe online because it's a Guy Grossi recipe and there are very few of them online. It's curious is it not how many cooks are happy to publicise their recipes even if they come from books they want to sell, and others are not? At one end of the scale you have Delia and Jamie who have virtually all of their recipes online in one form or another - and at the other you have restaurateurs like Guy Grossi, and authors like Stephanie Alexander who have a few but not many. Of course the oldies - Elizabeth David et al. were too early to publish online, and so you have to rely on people who are cooking their way through their recipes or who have made the occasional dish.
This recipe comes from this book, which I think I or my lovely friend Monika found in an op shop. It's certainly out of print anyway. I'm not sure whether I have 'reviewed' this book in the past, but have decided today to just concentrate on the recipe and the random thoughts and associated found recipes that ensued.
The most irritating one of these is a recipe that I am sure I know is in one of the Ottolenghi books for a whole side of roast salmon - but do what I may I cannot find it. It's another worrying thought about my fading memory.
But back to pesce arrosto. Also to the opening words of Guy Grossi's introduction to his book, because they are very appropriate in this case.
"The oil, the flame, the onion - these are the fundamentals of my cucina and they are also a link to the past. You can trace it back for thousands of years, to the ancient roman days. It's the base of Italian cooking, the soffrito. This is the beginning of the cooking, the beginning of the kitchen, the beginning of the philosophy in the kitchen."
Surely our pesce arrosto is just a roasted fish you might say. No soffrito. But in fact there is soffrito. The fish is sitting on a base of onion, celery, carrot - the soffrito. Although here is a curious thing. The photograph definitely has carrot underneath the fish, but there is no carrot in the recipe. I wonder which is wrong - adding carrot when the photograph was taken or forgetting to include it in the recipes. Minor but sort of interesting. I reckon the carrots should be there.
Thousands of years. Yes thousands and thousands of years. I'm willing to bet that roasting a whole fish over flames was one of the very first things that humans cooked long before the Romans. Of course they would not have had baking dishes or thought of soffrito in the very earliest of times, but I'm still willing to bet that people were roasting fish sitting on vegetables and slathered with some kind of marinade or coating, long before the Romans.
It's an ancient, even primitive way of cooking fish, and it's still done as the Sumerians did it, in Iraq. It's called masgouf. As shown here, the fish are first gutted and flattened, placed between a kind of grid and stood around a huge burning fire until almost cooked through, and then put directly on to the coals to finish it off - pretty sensational and Iraq's national dish apparently, so it obviously deserves a post of its own one day.
Going back to Guy Grossi's recipe however, what we have here is a fish roasted on a bed of vegetables in an oven - although he does say you could barbecue it - in a dish I'm guessing, and smothered on top - the skin of the fish having had deep cuts made in it - with a breadcrumb mixture that includes, garlic, ginger, chilli, coriander, parsley and dill and the inevitable olive oil, salt and pepper. Something so foreign to my childhood - even the notion of a barbecue was foreign - but so commonplace today. And yet spectacular.
Because what we are all about here is making a statement but in a way that is so easy that a child could do it. Well with a bit of care from parents when it comes to slashing the skin of the fish. Another one of those non recipes that makes me despair of the non cooks.
Coincidentally Ottolenghi's last newsletter was on this very topic - making a splash in a totally easy way with a whole fish - or at least in his case a large chunk of fish:
"When it’s already this afternoon, people are coming for dinner, and you want the table to feel generous without spending the evening with your back to everyone. My go-to is almost always a big fish in the middle of the table. ... one magnificent centrepiece surrounded by an almost absurd number of condiments, pickles, mustards, and other things to put on it, with it, around it. Yotam Ottolenghi
This was his solution - Roasted hake and tomatoes with spiced cashew sauce but alas the recipe was not in the newsletter nor anywhere else, because I only have the free subscription. So you would just have to make it up yourself - a spicy cashew sauce - well you could have a go - he even gives a clue by saying:
"To save time, skip the spice mix and use a shop-bought dukkah or the Ottolenghi Citrus spice mix instead."
So like Guy Grossi's Italian version which you could elaborate upon easily enough - you could do the same with an Ottolenghi-ish version using whatever spices you fancy. Whatever fish you fancy as well. Or even different vegetables.
Seeing this dish, however, and the coincidence of it all sent me searching for that lost salmon recipe. but it is nowhere. Maybe I have the wrong chef. And indeed I do and I have just found it. I was close because it's an Ixta Belfrage recipe which she calls Celebration salmon but again the recipe is not online - you will have to buy her book Meczla - which I really think should be on every cook's bookshelf. Treat yourself next time you are near a bookshop. It's a little bit different in that the salmon is not dry roasted as it were, it's a confit - slow roasted in a heap of olive oil. I think I'm going to try this one sometime, when I have a lot of people to feed, and when it's a special occasion because the salmon will cost a fortune - and it won't be very ethically sustainable either. But I tell myself it's a bit like chocolate - a little bit every now and then.
Because this is such a simple way of cooking whole fish and also because: "there’s something impressively theatrical about serving up a fish from head to tail." as Gourmet Traveller tells us, there are heaps and heaps of recipes out there, and you could do no better than begin with that magazine's 41 whole fish recipes for fish lovers which more or less covers the whole range of possibilities from across the world, because everybody on the planet with access to fish does it apparently, although Claudia Roden for one, seems to prefer frying or grilling - which is almost the same but not quite.
So here are some that I chose to feature - and I have to say that Ottolenghi seems to be particularly good at this - well he did say it was a go to for sudden large gatherings. As long as you have the fish of course.
The first one - from Ottolenghi has two photographs - one from the man himself, and one from a lady called Lorrie Graham - who made it and who is featured because she is the one with the recipe. I don't think Ottolenghi has published this one himself - Roasted trout with tomato, orange and barberry salsa and it's interesting to see that she has opened out her trout, and flattened it and Ottolenghi just left them whole. He also has blood oranges in his.
Two more from Ottolenghi - Roasted fish with aromatic olive oil - which is a very typical Mediterranean way of doing this thing - this time apparently based on Corsican herbs;
Puttanesca-esque baked salmon with an olive and caper salsa; then two Asian-style - Whole baked seabass with lemongrass and nam jim - Thomasina Miers and Malaysian style whole fish - Jamie Oliver
The only disadvantage of this method of cooking is the difficulty of eating it - if you keep the fish whole that is - skin, bones and all. It looks good as it comes to the table - but then how do you serve it out to your guests. And do you keep the skin on? Some like my husband do not like the skin, some do, so I would keep the skin on and let them remove it if they don't like it. The bones should come away easily of course, but you never know do you? Or you can choose fish of the right size for one person, then it's their problem. Or go for the huge pieces of salmon or other very large fish and remove the skin and bones before you even start. Salmon is always tricky costwise and ethics wise though isn't it? Unless you are a fisherman.
YEARS GONE BY
April 20
2025 - Nothing
2023 - Nothing
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2018 - Chimichurri - a quickie
Guy Grossi - say no more. The fish dishes look delicious. 😜