noodsletter #.0003
Greek sardines, taco bell, freaking onions.
Hello!
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The recipe section is located at the bottom of the email, the cargo of internet crap on top. I have put an asterisk next to the recipe titles so impatient desktop users can simply ctrl + F for “*” to jump; phone users will have to ssssscrolllll. The recipes are as follows:
1) Sardines I Ate in Greece With My Good Friend Liz
2) Onions With Katsuobushi
Also, I welcome your feedback! Leave a comment, send an email, whatever; you don’t have to be positive, you don’t even have to be nice, just be humane for god’s sake.
The Price of Entry
The sardine recipe has a story attached to it, of course, because every recipe has a story, no matter how simple, no matter how mundane.
Don’t worry, though, this isn’t some story of how I went on a beautiful vacation to Greece to attend some beautiful wedding on some beautiful Greek island and discovered like some idiot Columbus some incredibly simple but incredibly delicious local dish, made with beautiful, local ingredients, with beautiful, traditional techniques, with beautiful, local hands, and the end of summer has just got me thinking about all the beautiful, local (?) vacations I am not taking right now, all the delicious dishes that are just waiting for me, the idiot Columbus, to find. No. This is more about how I wish I could eat good quality fresh fish of a specific kind, which basically does not exist in this country, and being irritated at something I read in The New York Times.
Several years ago, when my wife and I went on a beautiful vacation to Greece, which we’d tacked on to a trip to the Greek island of Chios to attend the beautiful wedding of one of my childhood friends, I had the most incredibly simple but incredibly delicious local dish. I’m pretty certain no one, ever, had had it before.
We’d stopped in Athens to see the sights and take in, I don’t know, ancient history, and to visit with my good friend Liz. I had done some research about the cuisine, and I had some specific things I wanted to try. Namely, horta, the indigenous bitter greens that helped the Greeks survive World War II; gavros tiganitos, or fried fresh anchovies; and kokoretsi, a grilled log of lamb or goat offal wrapped with the animal’s intestines. I said as much to Liz, and she obliged me with the first two, taking us to a neighborhood restaurant she and her family have been going to for years and years, not fancy or expensive, just simple and good, kind of like a diner but without the litany of bad food.
We got some horta, which were just basically dandelion greens, and we got the fried fresh anchovies, which were fantastic, but they were also just fried fresh anchovies, which are always fantastic, and we also got a Greek salad (although I believe it was just called a “salad”), which was very good—good feta, good olives, good olive oil, good oregano, and, since the cuisine is one that truly values decent produce, unlike ours, which seems to merely talk about valuing decent produce, good cucumbers and tomatoes—but Liz also ordered some grilled sardines on the recommendation of our server. “They’re really good,” she said, “incredibly simple. Just some lemon and raw onion.”
And they were. In fact, they were hauntingly good, addictively good, and since I have an overactive food memory and I live in Bay Ridge, which has a rather significant Greek community, and it sits on the water, and there’s so little tree coverage that it feels like you’re limping around at the Acropolis on most sunny August days, I think about those sardines all the time. But they weren’t as simple as Liz suggested, even if they were simply prepared, and a couple years ago a local fish market would have defrosted, frozen sardines from Portugal prominently displayed in their window every Thursday, and after some trial and error, I believe I figured out the little tricks of that specific preparation.
They aren’t really about technique, per se; the tricks had more to do with architecture.
Part of what was so odd about the dish was that there seemed to be a hidden flavor. I could see the sardine fillets, the salt that studded their fleshy side, the slick of good olive oil that pooled in several places, the pinpoints of black pepper, the haphazard scatter of the cartoon-like leaves of the fresh oregano, the mature arugula and raw, diced red onion placed under and alongside. With a squeeze of lemon, the combined bite of all these disparate elements was incredible—quite salty, zippy and bitter from the arugula and pepper and olive oil, bracingly acidic from the lemon and raw onion, with a slight floral, heady note from the little bit of oregano, and then there was the textural combination of the soft and oily fish flesh, its crispy skin, the crunchy onions and the muddle of textures that is semi-dressed and half-wilted arugula—but there was something else that made it even more moreish, something extra.
I figured that extra bit out when I was attempting to recreate the dish one day but I’d forgotten to pick up lemons and was too lazy to pop out for more: red wine vinegar. But not just red wine vinegar, which isn’t quite right either, but a combination of red wine vinegar and lemon, which, for some inexplicable, alchemical reason, makes the sardine/onion/arugula/oregano combination even more incredible. (Right, so, there’s an actual, chemical explanation, as I believe that mixing acids moderates our perception of acidity, but I am rushing to finish this before work.)
So putting together the dish goes something like this: You put a bed of mature arugula (mature arugula tastes good, baby arugula doesn’t taste like anything but, sometimes, pepper) down on a plate, tearing it a bit so it won’t be awkward to eat, you sprinkle raw red onion over that, scatter some oregano, then sort of wet that bed of vegetal matter with a little red wine vinegar. The grilled/griddled/seared sardine fillets go on top of that, wilting the greens slightly even as they pick up some of the vinegar, and you drizzle everything with olive oil and give it a healthy squeeze of lemon. The effect is one of layers—vegetal, sour, and fatty, with the vinegar and the lemon combining to do some interesting things that are, in turn, made more interesting by the sardine fat and olive oil combining to do interesting things on their own. I can’t recommend it enough.
However, I can’t recommend you make this damn thing either. The thing about fresh sardines is… we don’t get them here in the US. For whatever reason (which warrants an investigation of its own), there aren’t any domestic sardine fisheries; the fresh sardines we can buy here are all from abroad, and for fresh sardines we only have bad options. The sardines I was buying, frozen from Europe, are labeled “Avoid” by Seafood Watch, which basically means you are, personally, murdering the planet with your grubby fishy fingers if you buy them. The ones pictured here are from a bag I bought at the beginning of the pandemic and stashed in my freezer, which is but a tiny indication of how impractical my initial freakout about the pandemic truly was. I have felt terrible about having that bag in the freezer for almost two years now!
So don’t make this, please, or if you do, just use something like Spanish or Boston mackerel; even a blue fish would work. Of course, none of those substitutions will be as good, since sardines are one of if not the best fishes in the world, but they will work. Or, you can do like Shel Silverstein and just eat a pile of beans instead, maybe check out my chickpea recipe from two weeks ago.
But what does this have to do with The New York Times?
As I was thinking about this sardine recipe, I kept thinking about Iva Dixit’s piece in The New York Times Magazine about disordered eating, which is also about eating raw onions. Specifically, the part where Dixit claims, “I am wholly aware that confessing my love for raw onions is almost akin to revealing myself as a believer in some fringe YouTube conspiracy theory.” What?
This is one of those observations where it’s clear that there’s an assumption upon the part of the writer, and the editors, and thus the publication, that the blinkered opinion of a vocal minority is the majority opinion. Who doesn’t like raw onions? Not the Greeks, certainly, as anyone who’s had a Greek salad can attest. Not the Japanese, I know, since my grandmother used to set a bowl of shaved raw onion topped with katsuobushi and soy sauce down on the table at breakfast. What about the onions served with cevapi, or the pile of onion slices that are an integral component of chole bhatura, or the nice dice that’s served with a delectable hollandse nieuwe? I mean, go to any diner and they’ll give you a wedge of an onion along with your badly done burger.
Liking eating raw onions is the norm, not the outlier; the outliers are children and whoever The New York Times and Iva Dixit believes they’re addressing, as well as the practitioners of various temple/salvation-oriented cuisines that avoid alliums because of how exciting they are, how they inflame the passions, because if you’re seeking some kind of transcendental truth, loving the earthy onion in its delectable raw state, which most humans do, is a major obstacle!
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Listen, I know I said on Instagram that I’d have something to say about my first and only foray into the wilds of Taco Bell cuisine, but I’m out of time. So, instead, just look at these photos. How can anyone, anywhere, claim that these are pictures of actual food, let alone that that food is appealing??
I received so many messages about these Taco Bell approximations of food, saying, “you have to be high,” or, “you weren’t drunk!”, or “this isn’t a good look this is elitist,” or, “nostalgia!”, or, “omg I have never eaten Taco Bell and I never will.” Someone asked what the point of posting the picture at all was. I don’t know! It was the worst food experience I’ve had in my life, and it was just Dr. Evil-level salty; the weird doughy pita/tortilla approximation was super salty! How? Why?
I sincerely love bad food more than most people, so maybe the point of it is we need to do better. Do better, Taco Bell! And don’t get me started on the blue drink! I don’t even know what the heck it is!
A Book Bit
Sleeping Sardines
“I’m tired of eating just beans,” says I,
So I opened a can of sardines.
But they started to squeak,
“Hey, we’re tryin’ to sleep.
We were snuggled up tight
Till you let in the light.
You big silly sap, let us finish our nap.
Now close up the lid!”
So that’s what I did….
Will somebody please pass the beans?
From Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
“News”
Seems like soil scientists need to get it together.
TROUT Magazine updated their photo policy:
“From here on out, only in very rare instances will you see a photo of a fish out of the water on the online pages of TROUT Magazine.”
TROUT Magazine also has a cooking section, and this is the most honest French onion soup recipe on the planet:
Tom Cruise ate two curries, one after another
The perfect Grub Street trend piece exists: “Mylks have added no peace to my life, only vegetable oil, sugar, and stress when I’m in an airport or sitting at a diner wondering which milk alternative I can realistically order.”
If you aren’t reading Vittles, it’s always interesting! This one about Yugoslavian food in London is a good example, but every single one is good: “The only thing that holds true is that flaky pastry, hot from the oven, seeping grease through its paper bag, accompanied by a drink of yoghurt and, almost inevitably, a cigarette, remains the ex-Yugoslavian breakfast of choice.”
I empathize a lot with this Marian Bull piece about hobbies and work, and it’s wonderfully written.
Ryan Sutton’s Eleven Madison Park review is worth a read.
The restaurant in this Pete Wells review sounds great, but naming a restaurant after Under the Volcano is bizarre.
AI-generated New Yorker cartoons:
Recipes
The recipes today just happened to not need quantities, as they’re exercises in physical construction—architecture, really.
Recipe 1* - Sardines I Ate in Greece With My Good Friend Liz
Makes 1 snacky serving
If you need a guide for how to fillet sardines, SE has you covered, naturally.
One thing I want to point out is that I almost always salt fish right after filleting. It cures the meat slightly, which firms it up and helps it to retain moisture, so you don’t have to worry so much about overcooking. It also has a few other salutary effects; it prevents oxidation, which means the fish smells (and tastes) less fishy, and salted fish skin is far less likely to stick when you throw it in a pan or on the grill. It also seasons the fish thoroughly.
I typically give it at least a few hours, but the salutary effects start to be noticeable after just 30 minutes. When salting the fillets, you don’t want to bury the things in salt, but you also don’t want to use too light a hand. If you’re using Diamond Crystal kosher salt the spread looks sort of like the spangle of stars on a clear night in a major city suburb’s night sky.
Ingredients:
Handful of mature arugula, rinsed and torn (or sliced) into bite-size lengths (if you use baby arugula, try to get the peppery stuff)
1/4 red onion, diced
Scattering of fresh oregano leaves (dried is just okay, like a pinch and a bit)
Red wine vinegar
6 salted fresh sardine fillets (5 if you want an odd number on the plate, to look fancy)(see the note above)
Neutral oil, like canola, to grease the fillets
Pepper
Good extra virgin olive oil
Lemon, for serving
Place a 10-inch cast iron skillet over medium-high heat and let heat for at least 7 minutes; you want the pan hot.
Scatter arugula over the surface of the serving plate; you want even coverage. Scatter the diced onion over the arugula. Sprinkle the arugula and onion evenly with a little red wine vinegar. Set aside.
Grease the skin side of the sardine fillets with a little oil, no more than a teaspoon or two for all of them, combined. Place sardines skin side down in the hot cast iron pan; they should immediately start smoking. Cook, without touching, until flesh side has almost completely changed color from bruise purple to a pale cream, except at the top, at which point the skin side should be crispy, about 2 minutes. Flip fillets and give the flesh side just a few seconds in the hot pan.
These need about ~20 seconds more before flipping Using a fish spatula, transfer sardine fillets, skin-side down, to prepared serving plate. Season with freshly ground pepper and drizzle generously with extra virgin olive oil. Serve immediately with lemon wedge alongside.
Recipe 2* - Onions With Katsuobushi
This is something we eat at my grandmother’s house in Japan, typically served at breakfast alongside miso soup, broiled fish, and pickles and other vegetables. I can hear my aunt yelling at me that you should only use a freshly dug up onion, but whatever, I do it this way all the time. I like to use hanakatsuobushi, which is the katsuobushi with the huge, feathery flakes, even though it’s supposed to be used for dashi; you can use hanakatsuobushi or the little shavings of katsuobushi, it doesn’t matter, but the hanakatsuobushi looks dramatic, even if it’s a little harder to eat, although I like it when a really big flake gets stuck to the roof of my mouth.
Makes 1 side dish, for 2-3 people
Ingredients:
1 medium white or yellow onion, peeled
1 small handful katsuobushi
Soy sauce, for serving
Cut onion in half and, using a mandoline or a sharp knife, slice onion halves as thinly as physically possible. Rinse onion slices in cold water, drain, then submerge slices in ice water and let sit for at least 15 minutes.
Drain onion slices thoroughly. Mound onion slices in a serving bowl and place katsuobushi directly on top. Before eating, drizzle soy sauce over katsuobushi, to taste, and mix it with the onions. Eat with hot white rice and oily broiled/grilled fish.
Love a good Silverstein food reference!