One of the small joys from doing some of your Christmas shopping in a second hand book shop is coming across the odd book that will do for no one else but you. So today I found A Concise Encylopaedia of Gastronomy Section II Fish complied under the editorial direction of Andre L. Simon and published in 1948.

The first thing that caught my eye was the description of mackerel straight out of the water, they are quite stiff, opalescent, with bright protruding eyes and bright red gills. Beware of the limp mackerel. Which is indigestible always, and maybe poisonous.

Good advice. I then noticed some of the odd names for fish and thought it might form the basis for an occasional series. Here’s starting with A.

Alec An old Latin word of Greek origin (salt fish), which is used to refer to a herring or a pickle of small herrings.

Alewife Lat. Pomolobus pseudoharengus. A member of the herring family very abundant off the Atlantic coasts of North America and of great gastronomic value.

Atherine Lat. Atherina presbyter. Commonly known as Silverside or Sand-smelt. An excelllent little fish which can be dressed in any way suitable for smelt.

Listening to and very much enjoying Frank Ocean.

On the moment I am reading Up In The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. It is one of the best books I have read in a while. The book is a collection of the pieces he wrote for The New Yorker bwtween the 1930’s and 50’s. They are long and discursive, dealing with the people, the characters he meets as he walks the streets of New York and its environs. He gives the people time to talk about themselves and what they do. Some of these conversations are almost an aside to the meaning that he was able to find for their lives and their place in the city.

One of the joys of the book is the time that he spends to describe the waters around New York and along the coast up to Connecticut and the lives of the fishermen and the other boatmen who spend their time, and make their living on the sea.

One of those men is an Ellery Franklin Thompson, a Dragger Captain, a dragger is a small trawler. Mitchell describes him as about as self-sufficient as a man can be. He has no wife, no politics and no religion. Amongst other things he notices his trousers leathery with fish blood and slime…

Later this month I should be receiving the latest copy of Fire & Knives which should contain an article I have written about lobsters and fishing for them with Tommy Arundel. As a sort of celebration of that here is a description of how Ellery Thompson cooks and eats his lobster.

He is a matchless lobster chef. He boils and he broils and he makes lobster chowder, but most often he boils. He puts a tub of fresh sea water on the little coal stove in the cabin and heats it until it spits. He wraps his lobsters in seaweed and drops them in, half a dozen in a batch, and times them with a rusty alarm clock that hangs from a cop hook on the underside of a shelf above the stove; after exactley fifteen minutes, he dips them out. He lets them cool slowly, so the meat won’t shrink and become flavorless and rubbery, the common condition of cold boiled lobsters in restaurants, and then he heaps them on cracked ice in the ice bin in the forward fish hold. He and his crew – Frank, the mate, and Charlie, the third man – reach in and get a lobster any time they feel like it. They eat them standing on deck. They smack them against the rail to crack the shells, pluck out the tail and claw meat, and chuck the rest overboard. One fall day, out of the Hell Hole, the three of them ate fourteen in between meals.

Earlier today I stole a couple of hours out in the garden, cutting back the buddleia in the wall, clearing out the beds clogged up with leaves and dead growth and finally emptying the greenhouse of the slightly disappointing tomatoes. Before I started I sawed up a bagful of logs for  the fire. I keep thinking I need a chainsaw for this, then last week I read the poem Galen is going for his English GCSE, Out Out, by Robert Frost about a boy sawing wood who is distracted by his sister’s call in to dinner and loses his hand. Given the damage I have done to myself over the years with just an ordinary saw I am probably safer with that.

Grubbing around in the beds I found the emerging shoots of next Springs growth although there was no sign of the hundred or so Snowdrop bulbs I planted earlier in the year.

Back inside I started on making some Beet Cured Salmon for the next meeting of the music group on Thursday evening.

There is a perverse pleasure in grating raw beetroot watching your hands stained blood red by the ineluctable juice. The grated beetroot was then mixed with a good handful of salt and sugar, chopped orange peel, crushed pepper corns, a glass full of vodka and a great bunch of dill.

Half this mixture was spread on the bottom of a plastic container, a skinned salmon fillet was placed on top, and the rest of the mixture was spread over. I laid the stalks from the dill on top and then weighted it down. My best weight is a lump of pig iron taken from an old lawn mower that was heading for the tip. That all went into the fridge for two days.

We will eat with creamed horseradish from the garden. I pulled out two crooked roots this afternoon. I suspect that next year it will be out of control and will have taken over its corner of the veg patch.

This evening I have been making more quince paste.

They are in the big pan on the oven having been boiled for three hours in water until they collapsed and then through two sieves and mixed back with almost its own weight in sugar.

Jane Grigson in Good Things  suggests that at this stage, when stirring, you should wrap your hand in a tea towel before taking the wooden spoon so the molten hot sugary paste doesn’t spit at your skin.

Late lunch/supper was roast chicken in goose fat, carrots with honey and cumin and roast potatoes. The oven was full for a while.

Listening to Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse – his slow taking apart of the spaces of the Old West.