RICHARD FRISBIE - Eating the Unborn

SUBTITLED: If It's On Your Plate, It's FOOD!

    It doesn't matter where you are in the world, there's always a restaurant, and people have to eat. Why shouldn't it be a great meal? I've been doing some culinary traveling lately, letting the chefs pick the menu, so I had to learn about eating etiquette the hard way. Here's some valuable advice gleaned from my last trip, offered with the hope that your next dining experience, wherever it may be,  will be trouble-free and memorable.

    This is the adventurous diner's mantra. "As one would clear a palate before eating, one should also clear the brain - Oomm." You must throw out the preconceived notions of what is good to eat, or bad, before you even sit down at the table. Prepare to experience everything with an open mind. There is no room for squeamishness about squid, or uneasiness about the unborn, or something so newly born that you can almost hear its mother calling for it. Cooked or raw, when it appears on your plate it's food, and you are there to eat it.

    In Northern Spain, the sky is the limit for possible ingredients for your meal. Bilbao, where I just returned from, is on the Bay of Biscay, and famous for its seafood. The meat and cheese from the local sheep and cattle are also world renowned. There is even a good chance that wild game could appear on the menu there, so it's best to be ready for anything. Anything, that is, except eels.

    Baby eels, or elvers, as we know them, are called angulas in Spanish. At one time hundreds of thousands were annually harvested in the Bay of Biscay. They were a popular fish to serve anytime, and especially around the Holidays. A typical helping would be a  handful quickly sautéed in olive oil and garlic until they turned a translucent china white. Then chopped chili peppers were stirred in and the whole served in a bowl with a wooden fork. Today, since the world eel population has plummeted, this dish is a rarity. Ironically, the once prolific eel could become extinct before its life cycle is fully understood.

    Eels spawn in the vortex on the edge of our imagination called the Sargasso Sea. Scientists, who confidently declaim as fact things that have never been seen, such as the big-bang theory and quantum physics, tell us this is so. We do know that the elvers float with the ocean currents to nearly every Atlantic shore. From there, they migrate up freshwater rivers and streams to spend as much as 20 years maturing, before they return to the sea to create another generation.

    I loved to go fishing when I was young. I told myself I was after the elusive Catskill Mountain trout, but mostly I remember catching only eels. I hated the slimy, swallow-my-hook, "trash" fish. I didn't want to touch them, but it seemed that there were more eels than trout taking my bait. That's because eels used to be plentiful in New York State.  At one time nearly half the biomass of our own Lake Ontario was made up of them. A midsummer eel count on the St. Lawrence river in 1980 totaled 25,000 in one day. All that changed due to over-fishing, pollution, dams and parasites, until, in 2003, the annual one day count on the St. Lawrence yielded only 20 eels. During that twenty-three year period the entire American eel population decreased by 99%, and similarly dropped by 80% in Europe.

    So, you can be confident an eel course is out of the question. Even the faux eels, called la gulas, which are a popular substitution in Spanish cooking, would be too plebeian for a good restaurant to serve. Think of the fake crab meat made up of processed and bleached scraps of fish molded into leg pieces and striped with red dye, and you have an idea what la gulas are. Except, to make the little worm-shaped food, the Spanish extrude the fish mass through tiny tubes, and someone even paints on eyes to help them resemble, more in look than in taste, the newborn eel. I suppose when you add enough butter and garlic they almost taste good.

    While we can eliminate eels from the menu, we can't eliminate the unborn. That would be caviar, the eggs of that ancient species of fish called Sturgeon. Traditionally harvested in the Caspian Sea, the population of wild Sturgeon, individuals of which can live for up to 100 years, has plummeted because of pollution and over-fishing. For too long fishermen have ripped the promise of future generations from the belly of the female sturgeon's still flapping corpse. It's the same as eating the seed corn, or, for that matter, elvers. Nevertheless, sturgeon are still slaughtered for their eggs.

    The good news is that Sturgeon farmers in this country are now raising the fish for meat and caviar production. Sturgeon are slow growing fish. It takes 10 to 12 years for females to reach egg producing age. It is a big investment, but the American farmer's patience paid off recently when taste tests compared the "farmed" roe favorably to that of their near extinct wild cousins. Since it is roughly half the price of native caviar, there is definite interest from chefs and food connoisseurs around the world. Environmentalists hope that the cultivated variety will reduce the pressure on the wild population so it can rebound.

    Sturgeon used to be plentiful in New York State until their population declined from over-fishing and pollution. (Sound familiar?) Recent restocking efforts in the Hudson River promise to help reestablish them locally. Fish as big as five feet long were reintroduced over the past year. Now, those familiar road signs with a picture of a sturgeon to advise us that the water we are crossing is a tributary of the Hudson take on new meaning.  Remember this the next time you are fishing. If  you inadvertently hook one of these ugly monsters, learn from our ancestor's errors, and release it for posterity. Until then, stay away from wild caviar.

    Naturally, knowing all that, the first course for the best meal of my recent trip to Spain was wild beluga caviar! I hesitated for a moment, but couldn't let that mother sturgeon die in vain. I ate her roe in all its silky-smooth, nutty-sea splendor. What else could I do? The unborn never tasted more delicious. The next course was prawns, crushed and heated until just aromatic, served warm, but raw. That was followed by an upright baby squid in a pool of its own ink, with tentacles pointing accusingly up at me. Dinner went on like that, course after course, and it was fantastic! I ate it all.

    I told you I learned the hard way. Trust me. With mind and palate cleared, you can eat anything that's put in front of you. That is, if you know which utensils to use for each course! But that's another story.

Buen Provecho!

Richard Frisbie, FOOD Correspondent:

RICHARD FRISBIE is published twice a month to Gather Essentials: Food 
It is a food junkie's take on growing, raising, preparing and - above all else - eating food. Together we’ll explore the trends, addictions, equipment and regional specialties that make up the sometimes mundane and sometimes sublime cooking and dining experience. You can keep up with my other postings and Gather activity by joining my Gather network -- just click here [Inset link to namespace] and select the orange “Connect” button on the left-hand side of the page --- I look forward to hearing from you.

BIO - Richard has been writing culinary travel articles for more than five years as a columnist for his local newspapers, and as a regular contributor to the many Hudson Valley, Catskill Mountain and other regional New York publications. His most recent addition to that list is a wine column called “Fruit of the Vine” for Life in the Finger Lakes magazine. Online, he writes frequent articles for EDGE publications and Travel Lady, as well as Gather.

You can read all  Richard's articles and you’ll find him and other Food Correspondents, plus celebrity chef content and plenty of other Foodies at Food.gather.com