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    India is a treasure trove of fish; here's why we should be pescatarian!

    Synopsis

    ​Indians love cutlets of all kinds, but we tend to make them as a snack and a way to use up leftovers. Most people would rate a chicken cutlet a distant second to a tandoori chicken or curry dish.

    fishesAgencies
    Fish cutlets can serve as a way to introduce people to the joys of different kinds of fish, which they might have avoided for fear of tangling with the bones.
    In Goa’s fish markets, you often see a vendor with a long fish with several diagonal cuts, but not detached from the spine. When she holds it up, the segments splay sideways like a fleshy Christmas decoration.
    This is karli or wolf herring (Chirocentrus dorab), a fish notorious for its twisty bones. “Everybody agrees that this is a deplorably bony fish, but many regard this disadvantage as outweighed by the good taste of the flesh,” writes Alan Davidson in his 'Seafood of South-East Asia'. This style of cutting helps slide the flesh off the bones.

    Davidson notes that in Hong Kong, it is used for fish balls. These are among a range of recipes where fish is deboned, usually mixed with a filler like breadcrumbs or mashed potato, and a binder like egg, and then fried, baked or poached.

    Every culinary culture which loves fish has some version of this — like French quenelles de brochet, a haute cuisine classic where pike, a bony freshwater fish, is deboned and made into light dumplings.
    Japan has kamaboko, fish cakes, which can be formed and coloured in different ways, like narutomaki, made with a pink spiral that recalls a famous whirlpool. Portugal’s love of salt cod created pasteis de bacalhau, which a few Goa restaurants used to make, but it has vanished now.

    At the end of his life, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks rediscovered gefilte fish, jelly-like fish balls fed to Jewish children and invalids: “Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, eighty-two years ago.”

    One of the specialties of Bengal is chitol machher muthiya, made with the belly of a river fish (Chitala chitala) that is so bony that the flesh has to be carefully scraped away before being made into dumplings. The bangda cutlets that a few Goa restaurants like Avo’s Kitchen now have on their menu allow you to enjoy the rich tasting flesh without dealing with mackerel’s many bones.

    Shubhra Shankwalkar, who is reviving heirloom Goa recipes, has written about the rarer delights of aatanchi dangar, a cutlet made with mackerel livers. You have to clean many to get enough for a few cutlets, so this seems likely to remain a cook’s treat.

    Indians love cutlets of all kinds, but we tend to make them as a snack and a way to use up leftovers. Most people would rate a chicken cutlet a distant second to a tandoori chicken or curry dish. But fish cutlets can serve as a way to introduce people to the joys of different kinds of fish, which they might have avoided for fear of tangling with the bones.

    A lot of recipes for fish cutlets recommend starting with bland tasting white fish like basa. These have few bones, so it’s easier in the kitchen. They also rely on spicing to make the cutlets taste good. But I think this is a missed opportunity. It’s worth taking more time in the kitchen with bony, but tasty fish — or paying someone well for all that work — and then making the cutlets with minimal spicing to focus on the rich taste of fish.

    A recent survey showed a significant increase in fish consumption in India, from 4.9 kgs per capita annually in 2005 to 8.9 kgs in 2020. Details about the type of fish consumed are lacking, but it seems likely that much of the new consumption is of easy-to-eat fish with few bones, whether wild caught (pomfret, grouper) or farmed (basa, tilapia).

    This is a problem because wild varieties are being overfished, while fish farming requires fishmeal which is made by indiscriminately harvesting any marine organisms, depopulating whole sea beds. People need to try a wider variety of fish, like karli and bangda, that taste great, but can be hard to eat — and encouraging them to make fish cutlets could be one way of doing it.

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