Cooking fish tonight? No need to worry

We were talking fish last weekend at a foodie event in Camden.

The second Maine Fare was held in places around town, and before I was done I had taken a survey about potatoes from the University of Maine, sampled chocolate, sausage, pizza, Maine-made gin and vodka, bought some nice little onions for pickling and these great chocolate-covered malt balls.

At 3 o’clock I did my level best to show people what to do with several sorts of summer squash. And I had some nice conversations with friends I hadn’t seen in some time.

What sticks in my mind is the panel I was on in the morning; it focused on fish – growing, selling and cooking it. I spoke on the cooking part.

Even though I write about food and I’ve studied its history, I am in the same boat as all of you when it comes to mealtime. I have to look in the fridge and figure out what to make for supper. And fast food or takeout isn’t much of an option here. So unless you’ve made a date with the Schwann’s man and have something secreted away in the freezer, you have to cook what you have on hand.

I imagine some readers in more rural parts are in the same situation. That probably means that, over the years, you have grown pretty good in the wing-it department, just as I have. I crank out a recipe here every week, but my own home cooking is a splash of this and a dash of that.

So when the nice young man from Jesse’s Fish Market in Rockland who was on the panel with me said he sees customers come into his store with a recipe from the Food Network clutched in one hand, my heart went out to him.

Fish is, and has been for a couple hundred years, kind of a hard sell. People feel a little nervous about cooking fish if they aren’t familiar with it. And though years ago it was wicked cheap, nowadays most fish is a bit of an investment that you don’t want to mess up.

He recommended eating fish from a local source, in season, and not frozen on the fishing vessel. He said to go with your instincts; buy a fish that looks good to you, has flesh that is still a little translucent, doesn’t have any yellow cast to it, is firm and doesn’t smell fishy. If you don’t know how to fix it, ask the fish seller.

If you go into the fish store looking for a particular fish because you have a recipe for it, and it isn’t in season or isn’t available off Maine’s coast, such as red snapper, you probably aren’t going to end up with a very satisfactory specimen. What I do is develop a strategy for certain kinds of fish.

When I have a fillet of some fairly bland white fish (cod, tilapia, haddock, cusk, hake, striper and pollock, even), I make a chowder or I bake or broil it. Here is one way to fix almost any kind of fish matching that description. This is less a recipe than an idea for how to cook it. I owe the idea to my longtime friend Mary Hughes who first made it for me and Jamie one evening for dinner. It was tasty, and I was surprised by its simplicity – it tasted like it ought to be more complicated.

Give it a try, and don’t worry. Just go get some good-looking fish, and let the folks behind the fish counter advise you. If they haven’t a clue about where the fish comes from, go somewhere else.

Baked Fish with Mayonnaise and Mustard

Fillet of white-fleshed fish, allow about one-third pound per serving

? cup mayonnaise (less or more, depending on how much fish you have)

Couple of tablespoons of a nice grainy mustard or whatever mustard you have

Salt and pepper

Grease or oil a baking pan and preheat the oven to about 350 degrees. Lay the fillet in the pan. Salt and pepper it lightly. Mix together mayonnaise and mustard and spread it on fish, not too thickly. Put fish in oven, bake for 15 minutes and test for doneness. If the fish flakes apart when you poke it with a fork, it is done. If not, put it back in the oven until it is done.