Learning to cook

No, this isn’t a post about my for­ma­tive cook­ing expe­ri­ences, or how I knew that cook­ing was an avo­ca­tion upon the first taste of some­thing or other. Rather, it’s a post about the first cook­ing class I’ve ever taken. Helen Ren­nie has a blog called Beyond Salmon, and runs Helen’s Kitchen, a series of cook­ing classes held, that’s right, in her home kitchen.

I first “met” Helen years ago on Chowhound.com, long before the lamented-by-me site re-design made the boards unus­able, flooded with Noobs who couldn’t do a Google search if their helper mon­key typed it for them. Back then, she and I both posted on the New Eng­land, Boston, and Home Cook­ing boards, and I knew she had a food blog, too. Read­ing her board posts, I knew she was a woman after my own heart, in love with cook­ing, eat­ing, and feed­ing the peo­ple she loved. Her recipes, responses to “What’s for Din­ner?” posts, menu sug­ges­tions, and restau­rant reviews par­al­leled my ideas about what was good cooking—fresh ingre­di­ents, prop­erly pre­pared, with com­par­a­tively few ingre­di­ents and tech­niques, in order to let the food shine through—basically, la cui­sine bour­geoisie, good home cook­ing with a bit of effort. We ate at the same restau­rants, shopped at the same stores, liked the same com­bi­na­tions of food.

My essen­tial shy­ness lim­ited me to doing noth­ing more than com­ment­ing on her blog, fol­low­ing her posts, and hold­ing a silent but deep admi­ra­tion for her deci­sion to make her avo­ca­tion into a career. Since I’ve started blog­ging, I’ve always had Beyond Salmon on my blogroll, and I’ve dis­cov­ered the joys of more than one new cook­ing tech­nique from read­ing her site.

In the mean­time, I’ve been post­ing here, pretty sim­ple stuff, but that’s what peo­ple like to eat most of the time. And I’ve been mulling, mulling, mulling over tak­ing a cook­ing class, and improv­ing some of my skills. I’m entirely home-taught—I learned by cook­ing with my par­ents, and by cook­ing on my own and with my hus­band. I read most of the food mag­a­zines, was an avid PBS and FoodTV watcher when I had a TV, and I try to stay on top of what’s what in the food world, but I’ve never taken an actual class. The basics-types classes are not what I need– I know how to cook an egg, cut up a chicken, poach a pear. I do need to improve areas where I’m com­pe­tent, but could be better—knife skills, bread and pas­try bak­ing. And there are some areas in which I am com­pletely ignorant—which brings me (you’re still read­ing? Thank you!) to Helen’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish class. (scroll down for descrip­tion).

My expo­sure to fish, grow­ing up, con­sisted of exactly three things: 1) fish sticks and tater tots, pre­pared by my Irish-American grand­mother on Fri­day nights, 2) fried seafood at Kelly’s in Revere, and 3) boiled lob­ster, pre­pared by my mother for birth­days and Christ­mas Eve. We sim­ply didn’t cook fish as a reg­u­lar course—Dad, because they were a meat and pota­toes Irish fam­ily, and Mom, because she grew up in the Mid­west, and had no fish background.

Since then, I’ve cul­ti­vated a grow­ing fond­ness for cer­tain things—lobsters, mus­sels (Atlantic only, please), scal­lops, fresh tuna, and fresh salmon. But the rest of the fish world was beyond me. White fish? Ugh, tastes like rub­bery noth­ing. Sword­fish? Tough and stinky. I’ve hereto­fore lim­ited my home cook­ing of fish to salmon roasted in onions and but­ter, or the occa­sional wild poached salmon, in either Soy Vey Teriyaki sauce, or miso paste and lemon juice. I will order blue­fish or skate when we go to Ten Tables, my favorite restau­rant in my end of town, and one of the best restau­rants in Boston, hands down. I will order Jasper White’s pan-roasted lob­ster when we go to The Sum­mer Shack. And I’ll order mus­sels mari­nara at Bertucci’s, nearly every time. (OK, yes, Bertucci’s is a chain. But it’s the only one we eat at!) But cook­ing fish at home? Not so much.

For my birth­day this year, I decided to rem­edy this shock­ing gap in my culi­nary skills, and sign up for a class. I’d ini­tially signed up for Helen’s knife skills class, but owing to some vagary of my email or just a plain old lapse on my part, I for­got to pay. (Oops.) So I signed up for the fish class, which was the other one on my list.

Classes take place in Helen’s small but amaz­ingly counter-full home kitchen. (And she has mar­ble coun­ters. So jeal­ous.) The eight of us tak­ing the class first sat down in the din­ing room to talk about find­ing a good fish­mon­ger, and what to look for in a good (or bad) fish mar­ket. To hear an expert say that we needn’t com­mit to mem­ory each fish that might be a good sub­sti­tute should the one we want be out of sea­son was an enor­mous relief. For an expert to admit that she learns some­thing new every time she goes to the mar­ket was an inspi­ra­tion. Helen then talked about the dif­fer­ent types of cook­ing meth­ods, and about the four fac­tors inher­ent in fish (fat­ti­ness, tex­ture, thick­ness, and fla­vor) that affect what cook­ing method you should choose.

Class­room com­po­nent over, we spent some time just look­ing at the fish. Helen had blue­fish, salmon, hal­ibut, striped bass, and sword­fish. We talked about each of the four fac­tors in rela­tion to each of the fishes on offer, and passed the plates of fish around to look at (and smell) more closely. Here was my first lesson—fish are oddly shaped, and some­how I’d been cher­ish­ing the illu­sion that “good” fish filets/cuts are evenly shaped. They’re not. You’re often (unless you’re eat­ing a steak) going to have thin­ner and thicker bits, and uneven edges where the bones have been removed. Know­ing that the shape of the fish is out of my con­trol was a relief, because it’s one less thing to worry about.

After learn­ing what good fish looked like, we got to work. I don’t want to re-create Helen’s whole site or re-type all the recipes we cooked, but suf­fice it to say, we tried all the major meth­ods for cook­ing fish—roasted salmon teriyaki, pan-seared striped bass with orange gre­mo­lata, broiled sword­fish proven­cal, roasted blue­fish on a bed of crispy pota­toes, (Note: Helen used lime juice and cilantro in place of the lemon and pars­ley listed in the recipe link. It was amaz­ing.), and poached hal­ibut in a sor­rel cream sauce. (This recipe isn’t avail­able online and I don’t want to post Helen’s recipe from the class mate­ri­als with­out per­mis­sion, but this recipe is basi­cally the same, omit­ting the cilantro, sub­bing in a good hand­ful of sor­rel, finely chopped into a chif­fon­ade, and omit­ting the orange.) We spent a ton of time tak­ing the fish in and out of the oven and test­ing it for done­ness. And I learned that I’ve been seri­ously over­cook­ing my fish—I’ve been cook­ing to opac­ity, instead of cook­ing to just before, and let­ting the fish rest and fin­ish cook­ing. No won­der my fish is some­times saw­dusty. Helen insisted that we each get in there with a fork or with tongs to make sure we got a feel and a look for when a piece of fish is cooked. I don’t know why this was a new les­son to me—I knew it when it comes to chicken and meat, but I never made the men­tal leap to fish.

The other les­son? Enough sea­son­ing. I am a girl who loves her salt. The Bet­ter Half has sev­eral times threat­ened to gift me with a salt lick. And I know that enough salt and pep­per can make or break a dish, even with the very best ingre­di­ents. But I just didn’t have enough expe­ri­ence with fish to be brave with the salt and pep­per like I am with veg­etable or meat dishes. Watch­ing Helen dip repeat­edly into the bowl con­tain­ing her day’s sup­ply of kosher salt and fresh-ground pep­per, to shower a vis­i­ble coat of sea­son­ing on the fish before cook­ing, I was reminded again of a les­son that I’d not been able to trans­late to fish.

And the results? Deli­cious. We ate as we went, sam­pling each dish as it was ready. I already knew I liked oily fish, so the blue­fish and salmon were no sur­prise, but the leaner fishes were deli­cious, and full of savor. I was par­tic­u­larly caught by the hal­ibut, served in a sor­rel cream sauce—partly because I’d never cooked with sor­rel before, and mostly because I.Hate.White.Fish. Or so I thought.

I’m excited—it’s been a while since I dis­cov­ered some­thing “new” when it came to cook­ing. But now, I’ve got a whole new world of fishy good­ness to explore.