Slammin’ Salmon
Ever since I was a kid, I have had a strong aversion to fish. I, like most people my age, ate my share of fish sticks in my youth and I didn’t hate them, but they are coated with bread crumbs and fried or baked to the point of being a bread stick with some tasteless white stuff in the middle…and a lot of tarter sauce all over them. I think its fair to say that that doesn’t really qualify as fish. Over the years, I have been more adventurous about things from the sea, but there are natural limits. Shrimp cocktail is pretty good so long as the shrimp are prawns (i.e. large) and fresh and the cocktail sauce is piquant an tart. I can more or less say the same thing about crab so long as I don’t have to extract it bit by bit from the shell. The whole crustacean thing doesn’t work for me too well, but that is less about the fact that those critters lived in the sea and more about the fact that I don’t like the animalistic aspect of eating something out of its skin or off its bone. That primordial tendency is either something you love or you dislike. I am not even a fan of steak on the bone or roasted chicken that must be eaten off the bones. It’s just a thing with me and the combination of this pickiness towards the sea and eating something that looks and feels too much like a creature may very well mean that I should have been a vegetarian.
The things that I like least from the sea are the true shell fish like clams, mussels and oysters. I have countless experiences with all three that I like to recite to explain why I am so put off by them. The clam thing started in Maine when I was in my pre-adolescent years. We would venture to the coast and everyone would go ga-ga over steamers and I simply found it gross. The thought of eating a whole organism always bothered me a great deal and the sliminess sure didn’t help. I remember hearing someone that loved oysters once say that they couldn’t imagine what the first man that swallowed a raw oyster was thinking. I actually think the poor guy was just so hungry that pouring anything down his throat that wouldn’t kill him was probably instinctive and necessary. As for mussels, I have this stark memory while living in Italy in high school that there was a typhoid scare that came about due to pollution in the Mediterranean Sea that found its way into the human population through tainted mussels. I learned that mussels are a scavenger shellfish that eat up lots of nasty stuff in normal course. That did not do much to endear me to the little black buggers. And finally, the nasty oyster. There is a food that many people love and covet. I am less traumatized by seeing people eat oysters fresh from the shell with a slurp than I am remembering the oily, smelly canned oysters that a guy from Hong Kong that I roomed with for a summer used to eat with abandon. The smell of canned, oil-laden oysters still haunts me to this day.
Let’s talk lobster for a moment. My years in Maine were in some ways wasted on me. So many people pay such a premium for lobster and find it to be such a delicacy that I have always said that I was happy to leave them to it since to me, lobster was nothing more than a vehicle for eating melted butter…not unlike prawns being a vehicle for cocktail sauce. I can eat lobster just fine and a nice lobster roll with lots of mayo even comes close to being something pleasant, but put a three-pound whole lobster in front of me on a table and I will stare at it with horror. I can’t imagine why someone would want to grab that creepy crawly thing that looks like an overgrown cockroach and rip it in half and dig in. Extracting the tail seems halfway civilized since at least it has some substantial meat in it. But when you get into the midsection of the beast I recall that there’s something green there called the tomalley, which is the pancreatic system of the thing. Yeesh. And then, watching people rip off the legs and claws to suck out the little succulent bits in them seems borderline barbaric.
So, in the land of actual fish (as opposed to shellfish), I separate the world into white fish and oily fish. White fish like cod and halibut and sole are relatively inoffensive. So long as they are properly boned (a fish bone through the cheek is another one of those nightmares) I can pick at them and try to find some sort of sauce to give it some taste. Oily fish, on the other hand, should it find its way into my mouth, will simply not go down my gullet. I gag on oily fish the way I gag on very few other things (raw tomatoes being a fine example). I simply cannot get it down and it does, indeed, make me retch. So, if you want me to be a polite house guest, please don’t try to offer me oily fish.
I have never been so hungry that I felt I just had no option but to eat oily fish. I have, however, felt under enough social pressure to try to eat it, and I know it cannot be done. I have tried as a host anxiously awaits my reaction to their favorite flavorful fish dish, but it rarely ends well. At a rubber chicken affair when I get served fish that I don’t like, I can usually find a way to hide it on the plate either by putting it under a bit of cabbage or just breaking it up and dispersing it over the plate. I’ve never actually put it in my napkin, but I know that may a last resort tactic. But at dinner with friends I have had some pretty unpleasant experiences with fish.
Yesterday, Winston and Kathleen, our neighbors from across the street, were kind enough to invite me and Natasha over for dinner. Winston proudly proclaimed that they were anxious to grill some fine salmon for us. I accepted and then started to worry about it. You see, salmon is not a stranger to me. People generally LOVE salmon. It is, literally, Kim’s go-to meal whenever we are out. I would guess that 19 out of 20 times she orders some form of salmon. I can’t really decide where I place salmon on my fish hierarchy. It doesn’t seem to be totally oily, but that pink hue makes me not want to put it into the white fish category that I can find acceptable to eat. I generally default to thinking of it as a smellier variety of fish and therefore something that I stay away from with a passion. The fact that it is often smoked and eaten raw as a delicacy of great liking at all times of the day, as an add-on to bagels and an hors d’oeuvre before dinner, is nothing short of amazing to me. I would no sooner put a piece of smoked salmon in my mouth than eat a worm. I remember that scene from Trading Places when Dan Aykroyd steals a whole smoked salmon while masquerading as Santa Clause and drunkenly tried to eat it through his fake beard. That, to me, is the experience of eating smoked salmon.
I thought about bringing a piece of chicken over to Kathleen and Winston’s, but instead decided to gut it out. When the dish of salmon, with its light pinkish color, was passed to me, it didn’t help that the pieces were still attached to the skin on the lower side. Yeesh. But I took a half of a piece figuring my slight appetite in general could be my excuse to offset Winston’s declaration that they had loads more salmon in the kitchen. I stared at the fish during our dinner conversation and finally, after putting salt, pepper and sriracha salt on it, I gently dug in. The first bite did not offend at all. I am generally wary of first bites, because I remember my sea urchin experience in Chile years ago where it was the second and third bites that really offended me. But in this case, the rest of the salmon was actually OK. It was not entirely unlike eating a piece of baked sole. The sriracha salt definitely helped much as the cocktail sauce helps the prawns. I would normally leave the last few bites as someone who has given up his membership in the Clean Plate Club, but with the sriracha salt on it, I kinda liked it. Don’t get me wrong, I am still highly unlikely to ever order salmon voluntarily, but I will stop dreading it the way I had. Don’t expect me to be slammin’ salmon any time soon, and do expect me to find a pocket-sized sriracha salt shaker.