EATING THE UNBORNIf It's On Your Plate, It's FOOD!By Richard Frisbie
This is the adventurous diner's mantra. "As one would clear a palate before eating, one should also clear the brain - Oomm." You must throw out the preconceived notions of what is good to eat, or bad, before you even sit down at the table. Prepare yourself to experience everything with an open mind. There is no room for squeamishness about squid, or uneasiness about the unborn, or something so newly born that you can almost hear its mother calling for it. Cooked or raw, when it appears on your plate it's food, and you are there to eat it. In Northern Spain, the sky is the limit for possible ingredients for your meal. Bilbao, where I just returned from, is on the ocean, and famous for its seafood. The meat and cheese from the local sheep and cattle are also world renowned. There is even a good chance that wild game could appear on the menu there, so it's best to be ready for anything. Anything, that is, except eels.
Eels spawn in the vortex on the edge of our imagination called the Sargasso Sea. Scientists, who confidently declaim as fact things that have never been seen, such as the big-bang theory and quantum physics, tell us this is so. We do know that the elvers float with the ocean currents to nearly every Atlantic shore. From there, they migrate up freshwater rivers and streams to spend as much as 20 years maturing, before they return to the sea to create another generation.
So, you can be confident an eel course is out of the question. Even the faux eels, called la gulas, which are a popular substitution in Spanish cooking, would be too plebeian for a top restaurant to serve. Think of the fake crab meat made up of processed and bleached scraps of fish molded into leg pieces and striped with red dye, and you have an idea what la gulas are. Except, to make the little worm-shaped food, the Spanish extrude the 'fish' mass through tiny tubes, and someone even paints on eyes to help them resemble, more in look than in flavor, the newborn eel. I suppose when you add enough butter and garlic they almost taste good. While we can eliminate eels from the menu, we can't eliminate the unborn. That would be caviar, the eggs of that ancient species of fish called sturgeon. Traditionally harvested in the Caspian Sea, the population of wild sturgeon, individuals of which can live for up to 100 years, has plummeted because of pollution and over-fishing. For too long fishermen have ripped the promise of future generations from the belly of the female's still flapping corpse. It's the same as eating the seed corn, or, for that matter, elvers! Nevertheless, sturgeon are still slaughtered for their eggs.
I told you I learned the hard way. Trust me. With mind and palate cleared, you can eat anything that's put in front of you. That is, if you know which utensils to use for each course! But that's another story. Buen Provecho! |
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TM
It doesn't matter where you are in the world, there's always a restaurant, and people have to eat. Why shouldn't it be a great meal? I've been doing some culinary traveling lately, letting the chefs pick the menu, so I had to learn about eating etiquette the hard way. Here's some valuable advice gleaned from my last trip, offered with the hope that your next dining experience, wherever it may be, will be trouble-free and memorable.
Baby eels, or elvers, as we know them, are called angulas in Spanish. At one time hundreds of thousands were annually harvested in the Bay of Biscay. They were a popular fish to serve anytime, and especially around the Holidays. A typical helping would be a handful quickly sautéed in olive oil and garlic until they turned a translucent china white. Then chopped chili peppers were stirred in and the whole served in a bowl with a wooden fork. Today, since the world eel population has plummeted, this dish is a rarity. Ironically, the once prolific eel could become extinct before its life cycle is fully understood.
Eels used to be plentiful in the United States. At one time nearly half the biomass of Lake Ontario was made up of them. A midsummer eel count on the St. Lawrence river in 1980 totaled 25,000 in one day. All that changed due to over-fishing, pollution, dams and parasites, until, in 2003, the annual one day count on the St. Lawrence yielded only 20 eels! During that twenty-three year period the entire American eel population decreased by 99%, and in Europe by 80%.
Sturgeon are slow growing fish. It takes 10 to 12 years for females to reach egg producing age. The good news is that Sturgeon farmers in this country are now raising them for meat and caviar production. It is a big investment, but the American farmer's patience paid off recently when taste tests compared the 'farmed' roe favorably to that of their near-extinct wild cousins. Since it is roughly half the price of native caviar, there is definite interest from chefs and food connoisseurs around the world. Environmentalists hope that the cultivated variety will take up the slack while the wild population rebounds.
Sturgeon used to be plentiful in New York State until their population declined from over-fishing and pollution. (Sound familiar?) Recent restocking efforts promise to help reestablish them locally. Fish up to five feet long were reintroduced over the past year. The familiar road signs of a sturgeon advising us that the water we are crossing is a tributary of the Hudson River now take on new meaning. Remember this the next time you are fishing. If you inadvertently hook one of these ugly monsters, learn from our ancestor's errors, and release it for posterity. Until then, stay away from wild caviar. 
Naturally, knowing all that, the first course for the best meal of my recent trip to Spain was wild beluga caviar! I hesitated for a moment, but couldn't let that mother sturgeon die in vain. I ate her roe in all its silky-smooth, nutty-sea splendor. What else could I do? The unborn never tasted more delicious. The next course was prawns, crushed and heated until just aromatic, served warm, but raw. That was followed by an upright baby squid in a pool of its own ink, with tentacles pointing accusingly up at me. Dinner went on like that, course after course, and it was fantastic! I ate it all.