For starters, I was wearing a surgical glove to protect my dodgy thumbnail, which made the fish a lot more slippery in my grip. Twisting the head off was consequently much trickier than it should have been, and one of its eyes bulged with blood to a frightening extent. One more squeeze would have been interesting, but luckily its neck snapped just in time and the head went into the stockpot. I got along the backbone fine, and through the back half of the fish. Filleting over the pin bones is a bit trickier, you have to push them back with the blunt edge of the knife to make sure you don’t cut through them.
Once you’re over them it’s just a matter of taking the belly with you and not slicing through it too early. It is described to us as like reaching the top of a mountain - you want to glide down the other side, and not fall off the edge of the cliff. For today’s dish I need the skin off. This goes pretty well, surprisingly, until two thirds of the way through when I involuntarily change the angle of the blade and cut through the skin. It is now very difficult to get any purchase on what remains to remove it. I get there in the end but it is a bit of a mess.
I am making the cheese-laden Gratin of Cod that we were shown yesterday. I use two thirds of the cheese and cream that the recipe prescribes, mainly because you couldn’t find the fish in the one we tasted after demo yesterday. I am pleasantly surprised by the result. It actually tasted good. I cooked it for a couple of minutes longer than I should have, but luckily not so much that the fish disintegrated or lost any of its meaty structure. Maybe I’ll make it again I think. Really? I’m sure I could think of better things to do with the fruits of my filleting labours.
At around 7pm I get my second chance of the day to fillet fish. Real practice this time, because I am on a small trawler chugging around a beautiful island lighthouse as the sun begins to set, and the fish I am gutting are mackerel that I have just caught.
Now I am definitely no fisherman, but my first cast goes like this - I drop the line with its three feathered hooks. I hold the reel with my thumb and let line out for about ten seconds, which should get me somewhere near the bottom. I tug on the line three times to flash the feathers. I feel a bite, I reel in. I have a beautiful shiny mackerel on each hook: a nap hand. Within thirty seconds I am dispensing advice like an old pro. Do people really believe I know what I’m talking about? Almost certainly not. Do I? Not really.
I want responsibility for my own actions, so I object to not unhooking the fish myself. The hooks are barbed, so this is an unpleasant experience. With three on each line, you regularly double tag them as they squirm away, and mackerel are beautiful fish. My tenth or so comes in double hooked. I carefully remove the first from his lip. I work on the second that has pierced his skin about halfway down the body. He whips around. The line tightens and the hook I have just removed from his mouth flicks back and embeds itself under my already fucked thumbnail. I take a second or two here to appraise the situation. I am looking at a hook that a nanosecond ago was impaling a mackerel. Now it is impaling my most recent, fascinating and novel wound. Luckily the barb stays outside my flesh, so I delicately remove it and pray to the God of fishhooks that he will let me off.
Gutting a mackerel is pretty straightforward. You locate the fin near its head. On the tail side of this fin, you slide your knife in. When you hit bone you turn your knife. You cut into the flesh and along the cage of bones at a 45º angle. The quicker you do this the better. The guy whose boat we’re on does a whole mackerel in less than five seconds. It is a sight to behold. We proceed to hack into the bodies of the multitude of fish we have landed. We eventually get into the swing of things, but it doesn’t come naturally.
The seagulls have cottoned onto us by now. There are hundreds of them, squawking and flapping their wings menacingly. We cast off the filleted detritus and they swoop and dive and fight over it. Looking at them, I think I can understand why some people would be afraid of them. I also begin to understand the sentiment of the karate kicking Frenchman Eric Cantona as he attempted to portray himself as the new Albert Camus, but sans style, grace and content.
We caught a shitload of mackerel. One of the girls bagged a 5lb pollock to take catch of the day honours. We headed home and indulged in a massive cook off. Lemons were squeezed with wanton abandon and we indulged in the primeval pleasure of devouring food that an hour earlier was living and breathing and happily going about its business until we rocked up on the scene.
And with that, week two passed into history. Two down, ten to go. Exhausted, listless, confused, eyes glazing over and reeking of fish, we head to the pub en masse. We have reached the top of another mountain. We divide into two groups - some of us glide gracefully down the other side whilst others, myself included, head straight over the edge…
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