Liquid Sea, Slippery Fish

Early October in New England is a dreamy time of year. The trees are just starting to turn, with splotchy reds and yellows appearing among the top branches, and the changing colors are slowly working their way down. The days are still long, and the sun warm on your back. At night the temperature drops, and you can feel the summer receding into the distance. The air smells different.

On one of those perfect October afternoons, I ventured out to the Branford Land Trust to go fly fishing with three friends. It was my first time and I was excited to learn from my fly-fishing enthusiast companions. Though I spend all my days thinking about fish and the people who catch them, I am pitifully inexperienced when it comes to casting a line.

“Though I spend all my days thinking about fish and the people who catch them, I am pitifully inexperienced when it comes to casting a line.”

We parked along the road and meandered our way around a field of squash, through some woods, and down to the salt marsh. As we got closer to the shore, we started to hear a furious splashing. The woods cleared and the Long Island Sound came into view. The water was bubbling and jumping and sparkling with striped bass and bluefish (or, as Italian fishermen would say, “bollendo”—boiling like a pot of spaghetti). The larger predatory fish were chasing schools of alewives as they scattered frantically in all directions. The stripers and bluefish were on their way south for the winter, fattening up for the cold months ahead. It was one of those awestruck situations where you don’t really know what else to do but laugh at yourself and laugh at your good fortune. I have never in my life seen so many fish.

After learning to cast—back and forth and back and forth—and catching and releasing striper after striper [1], the glow on the marsh grasses was starting to fade with the day, and I decided to keep the next fish I caught for dinner. It was a bluefish, only about a foot and a half long but a strong swimmer. It put up a good fight.

I cleaned and de-scaled the fish, and we set up a small charcoal grill and threw it on top. Its skin crisped up and its fatty flesh solidified with the heat. Too eager to wait, we ate it straight from the grill with our hands. As I pulled flakes of warm fish off the sticky bones, I thought about the disconnect between the wild, slippery act of fishing and the solid fish that ends up on our plates—or in this case pinched between our fingers.

Seafood is palpably absent from most conversations about food systems and food communities, and many of the voices representing fisheries are equally absent. Most fishers in this country (with plenty of exceptions) probably don’t think of themselves as part of a food system. Rarely does a fisherman sell his fish directly to a consumer, which widens the gap between fisher and eater and obscures the idea of a cohesive system. More commonly, once a catch of fish lands, it makes its way through a series of mid-chain players who may be dealers, processors, aggregators, traders, wholesalers, and finally retailers of some sort. Only then does it make its way onto somebody’s plate. While our terrestrial food system has similarly convoluted supply chains, the wild nature of fish, different conceptions of marine property, and a wholly separate fisheries regulatory system make the slippery fish just that much more removed from its eventual eater.

“I thought about the disconnect between the wild, slippery act of fishing and the solid fish that ends up on our plates—or in this case pinched between our fingers.”

On a more basic level, it is hard to conceive of a community that is not located on solid ground. The idea of an agricultural community is simpler to define—say, by farmers who live in the same town or sell at the same market. But how do you take a wild animal, and the people who chase it, and gather them together? What does a “fishing community” look like? Is it fishers who live in the same place, or fish from the same dock, or follow the same stocks? Is it a geographically dispersed group of fishers who share a common interest?

The concept of community is an important one. Communities allow people to organize and to advocate for themselves, or for the betterment of something that matters to them. Under U.S. fisheries law, a place-based fishing community is a required unit for management purposes.

But just because a group of fishers resides in the same town doesn’t necessarily mean they operate as a network or community. Recent studies have explored “communities at sea” that are built around shared fishing grounds and information-sharing rather than common shore-based geographies. Lots of folks are doing incredible work to bring seafood into the food systems conversation. Organizations like the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, Dock to Dish and LocalCatch.org, for example build networks of fishers who can advocate changes in policies shift markets toward more equitable and sustainable ends.

Community takes many forms—based at sea, on the ground, or in a practice—and communities of fishers can help bridge that gap between a wild animal and a flaky finger-full of fish flesh.  

After the bones of my bluefish were picked clean, we climbed into our tents for the night. The next morning, I woke to the sound of my buddy Nick cackling with joy down by the water. The stripers were back with a vengeance. We spent the morning casting our lines—back and forth and back and forth—but I wasn’t so lucky this time. The slippery fish continued their migration south, and they’re not to return again until Spring.

[1] In Connecticut, the daily catch limit for recreational fishing is one striped bass with a minimum length of 28 inches. Any other stripers must be unhooked and released back into the water.

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Emily studies environmental management at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and is interested in the intersection of fisheries policy, fisherfolk, and climate change. 

Recipe Anarchist

I am a recipe anarchist. I can’t help myself from changing at least a little something.

I wasn’t so rebellious at the beginning. When I was ten, I was already used to preparing my lunch. Usually, it meant I had to cook the pasta, reheat the sauce somebody made for me, and assemble. That was easy. I started seriously experimenting with new recipes I had never made before, only after I had moved to university and had to provide food on my own. Back then, every time I tried something new I was pretty scared of leaving the path of the sacred recipe. I used to be loyal to the recipe and stuck to it blindly.

I remember the first time I prepared a ciambellone (a simple cake, usually made for breakfast) based on a recipe I got from my roommate during my first year of college. Making a cake was something scary, because it involved an expertise I didn’t have. I followed it passage by passage, weighing exactly all of the ingredients and taking in all of the suggestions she gave me: first mix the eggs well with the sugar, incorporate the flour little by little, and make sure you see the bubbles when you add the baking powder. The cake turned out really good and fluffy.

That year I started to test my cooking skills, and instead of a typical Italian nonna imparting her wisdom to me or my mother (who always hated cooking), middle aged women from all over Italy taught me how to cook through an online cooking forum I joined. One day, it was a gloomy winter evening, cold and humid, I was freezing at my desk, staring at my computer, when I found a pizza recipe on the forum. I decided to try it. It was my first time making pizza, and even though I followed the recipe, it was a nightmare.

Kneading the dough was not a big deal. The real problem in this story was letting the dough rise. According to the recipe, the dough should at least double in size, and this was related to a time indication of two hours. I was so naif to expect my dough to rise exactly in two hours. I would have even been content with maybe two and a half hours. After almost three hours, I asked, “Why is my dough not growing? How will I understand when it is ready?”

As I mentioned, that day was winter, cold and humid, and not a good day to give pizza making my first try. I remember going back and forth from the forum thread to my dough sitting near the heater, well covered under a towel, trying to ask questions on the status of my pizza on the forum in real time. But I was without help and couldn’t understand what I should expect from my dough. Of course, my pizza ended up being under-proofed, heavy, and thick.

That night I learned two things. First that if I wanted to do pizza I had to start well in advance to give it the time to rise. Second, I learned that recipes can’t teach you what experience does.

Few years after the heavy-pizza incident, I started getting more rebellious against recipes thanks to an empty fridge and the lack of measurement tools. I was still a student, I had moved to another town, and my apartment did not have a scale. Sans scale, I tried out all of the alternative ways of measuring possible. I measured how much flour could fit in a glass, or how much oil in a spoon. Furthermore, being a student, I often lacked the staples of home-baking. Sometimes I didn’t have enough eggs, I never had butter, and I often ran out of yogurt. Not surprisingly, my level of experimentation was intense at that time. If I found a recipe that I liked, I was guided by my past experiences that I had gained from stringently following recipes and tried to substitute ingredients. I judged the texture of a cake mixture by comparing it to my memories, pondering if it was smooth enough, too liquid, or too dense. I tried to figure if it could work and (of course) it didn’t many times. But I learned a lot from my mistakes, and I learned also how to understand when the pizza dough is well proofed.

Nowadays I’m not afraid of substituting ingredients when I find a recipe I like. I may not have  all of the things listed, or maybe there is an ingredient I want to avoid, so I adjust accordingly. I have to admit that I can’t help modifying at least a little something. I love recipes, and I always search for them. Unlike before, though, I use them more as inspirational ideas, as a starting point for my creativity when I want to turn the few vegetables left in the fridge in a tasty soup or mix them successfully into polpette -- and I can tell you from experience that not everything mixed together makes good polpette...

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Benedetta received  her Masters in Literature from the University of Bologna. She loves watching independent films alone, and has a deeply-rooted passion for grammar and high standards when it comes to bread and olive oil quality.

From Place to Plate

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From Place to Plate, a photo essay exploring the relationship between landscape and taste. Peruse this series, giving context to beautiful meals and breathtaking places from around the world. Click the image to begin the journey.

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Sami received her BS in Anthropology and Geography from Cal Poly with an emphasis on Nutrition. She is passionate about work that supports local food economies and seeks to make  good food more prevalent and accessible to all.