We cooked our first whole fish tonight.
I say “we” not because I was in any way involved in the cooking process, but because I was the one who spent half an hour getting all twitchy in the market as I mentally prepared myself to buy the damned thing. Fish in France almost never come without bones, for one thing. And the open-air markets are even less likely to have done prep work than grocery stores are, although they often will if you ask.
Hey–do you know how to ask a French fishmonger to clean a fish for you? Me neither.
I spent the morning reading my cookbooks and various websites in order to understand what “cleaning a fish” actually means. This isn’t the sort of thing that one usually needs to know at the Food Emporium, you know? But I needed to be sure that everything that should be done was done, one way or another, even if I didn’t know 90% of the vocabulary involved.
By the time that I made it to the market, I realized that I really, really did not want to do this. The French raspberries are finally just barely trickling in, and I couldn’t even get excited about that–what are the odds that I would look forward to buying something with its eyes still attached?
I walked, and walked, and walked until it became clear that I had no choice but to give in and buy a stupid fish. Fortunately, this moment arrived when I was in front of my favorite fishmonger: they are middle of the road in both price and quality, so that they’re good enough and cheap enough and never have the long lines that the places that have picked a niche have.
I pointed at a pile of bass. “Are those ready to cook?” I asked so awkwardly that I had to repeat it twice. “Oh! Of course!” the seller finally assured me. “Nifty,” I said, except that it probably came out more like: “Uomhm.” I asked for one. “Why not two?” the seller asked, and then laughed appreciatively at his own wit.
I don’t often get French “humor”.
So then he asked me if I wanted…something. I knew that it had to do with cleaning the fish, but there’s the bind: was he asking if I wanted it cleaned, or if I preferred to clean it myself? “Uomhm?” I asked. Twice. “You probably want _____,” he said confidentially, showing me the intact belly of the fish. “I usually ______ and ______.”
Oh, God, yes. Please don’t make me gut my own fish. He laughed at how emphatically I agreed once I understood.
It was delicious. And so were the raspberries. And we went to Chaumette last night, which was delicious too–and today when I went by with Jolie, the younger owner spent about five minutes on the ground cuddling her, in full view of their afternoon rush. And earlier this week, I went for a quick lunch with a girl down the street, just to have it last over three hours. And I finally have the hang of French wedding registries (they are different in a few very key details from U.S. ones).
I am home.
So why do I have to leave?