For the first years of my life I lived by the Welsh coast, where the River Severn flows into the North Atlantic Ocean. My Grampy, my maternal grandfather, was (and occasionally still is) a keen fisherman; our childhood holidays in Pembrokeshire were spent catching crabs off the pier, or standing on the cliff edge hoping something hefty would bite.
All this suggests I would be right at home in a fishmonger’s, but in fact I have more often felt out of my comfort zone surrounded by those deep trays of ice. It is a paradox of my coastal upbringing that we certainly ate more from the land than from the sea. When we did have a fish dinner it most often meant battered cod, fishcakes or fish fingers; occasionally, it meant a fillet, wrapped in silver foil and baked well with butter.
Very little of the seafood we ate carried much of a reminder that it once lived ‘out there.’ To my knowledge, even a number of things local to South Wales, like cockles and mussels (a food poisoning risk), or ubiquitous on British menus, like prawns (fiddly, perhaps also a bit creepy), have never graced the family fridge.
After I left for university I threw myself into some aspects of the seafood world, as though I needed to make up for lost time: to order moules marinière felt rebellious, dangerous, transgressive, although of course it was nothing of the sort; I still remember, with delight, my very first scallop. Other things about it still made me feel nervous: the ease with which the London-born students went out for sushi, as though it were the most familiar thing in the world; the very presence, not to mention the occasional use, of a dedicated deboning utensil in the college dining hall (“Phone for the fish knives, Norman”).
A few days before D and I went to Naples, we had a wonderful meal with R at Piatto Romano, in Testaccio, which featured, among other things, a beautiful spaghetti dish with totanetti, tiny squid, and cima di rapa, a slightly tart, almost lemony green. What better thing to try and recreate in Naples, a city blessed with an abundance of street markets?
We walked up and down the street a few times, and found somewhere with beautiful pearlescent vongole veraci — “true clams!” — still wriggling, almost jumping, in their shallow pool of water. Clams for lunch, squid for tea. The totanetti we wanted weren’t there, but I felt committed to this market stall: the seafood was lively and the owners were friendly. They recommended the next best thing — a few little octopuses — which we bought on the basis that, well, how different could they possibly be?
Though I am no longer a stranger to the fishmonger, I still feel as though I am blagging it at the counter. As far as the mechanics of seafood are concerned (deboning, shell-cracking, mussel-tapping) I am definitely still blagging it. It was too late to realise all the cutlery in our B&B kitchen was as blunt as a butter knife, so I had to plough on with a pair of scissors, the kind popular with primary schools. Snip, snip, tug, snip, hope I don’t throw any poisonous innards into the pan.
Cooking with D, accompanied by a bottle of three-euro home brew from the greengrocer, a dry, cloudy white, was a delight after nearly two months apart. Despite the constraints of the narrow work surfaces, our movements were in sync, and the smell of a kitchen busy with olive oil, garlic and evaporated wine was electric.
The very ends of the tentacles crisped up just as I had wanted; after a while in Rome, I had been craving the heat of red chilli, which we added liberally, daring each ourselves to stir in just a few more seeds than we supposed were strictly necessary. Our dinner did not taste anything like the dish we loved so much at Piatto Romano. But it was good all the same, and most importantly, it was ours.
On a separate note: it feels strange to write such a frivolous thing in these times, and it may feel strange to read it too; I resonated with Ella Risbridger’s excellent newsletter on this topic from last week. I have taken her advice and I have not tried to integrate these two disparate things, my ‘job,’ well, one of them, which is food writing, and war. You probably already know about Cook for Ukraine, because you have chosen to read a newsletter that is mainly about food, but just in case — there are many ways you can get involved with this initiative, which both fundraises for those affected by Putin’s war (including for UNICEF, but for other organisations too), and provides an incentive to learn about and experience Ukraine’s rich food culture.
The Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules has an Instagram page that she constantly updates with useful information and ways to help; World Central Kitchen is providing fresh meals to refugees fleeing Ukraine. Food is vital, but people need other things, too: Doctors Without Borders are doing life saving work, and you can donate here to help Black people struggling to leave Ukraine safely. Perhaps you could pick a cause close to you — there are many others, too — and, if you liked my newsletter, you could donate what you might pay for a paywalled article, or whatever you feel able to spare.