The Italians, who, despite their supposed reverence for the ingredient have as much of an interest in cooking techniques as do anybody else, express a certain penchant for extremes when it comes to the application of heat. A sauce is cooked for either five minutes or five hours, beef either raw or collapsing to the touch; when something is to be overcooked, as in that rather lovely broccoli cream used to dress pasta, they will overcook the hell out of it – which is just as it should be. If something is not at the extreme end of what you are trying to do to it, then it is not, to my mind, as good as it could be. The correct amount of salt in any food is nearly-too-much; anything less is not enough.
The thing with overcooking is that it comes in circles. The most obvious example is one of the cheaper cuts of steak, hanger or some other kind of skirt. Cook it fresh and bloody, and it cuts like butter under a questing knife; cook it medium-well, and your diners will think you have grilled them one of your worn-out Crocs. Cook it for three hours, perhaps with some sweet onion, some anchovy and a bosky Pinot Noir, and there it is again, melting to tenderness, just the thing to spread onto a piece of almost-burnt toast and eat, standing up, with some nearly-too-sharp pickles on the side. This is true, broadly speaking, of almost any sort of protein. You wouldn’t do it to a fillet steak, but then who eats a fillet steak in this day and age? Hamine eggs, to take another example, boil through grey rubber and on into soft cream, and are all the better for it.
We might not, perhaps, think of doing this to fish. Cephalopods, of course, demand the all-or-nothing treatment, with cuttlefish especially demanding a cooking time of either three hours or close to zero; even the apparently intractable octopus can, with a little judicious preparation (freeze / defrost / brine / dry / marinate) be successfully flash-fried. Your actual backboned swimming fish, though, would seem to be another matter, with even a fish stew only including the fish for the last few minutes of cooking – except, that is, for tinned fish. I’ve written before about the luscious texture, reminiscent of tinned tuna, you can get by slowly poaching fish in olive oil; since then I have also become enamoured with a Japanese preparation, involving entire mackerel cooking in a deeply flavoured marinade. The true, melting nature of actual tinned fish, though, requires the extra heat available from a pressure cooker; as luck would have it, I got one for Christmas.
I’m aiming to get hold of some tin cans to try this with, but for now I am canning fish in screw-topped Kilner jars; the principle is the same. Oily fish (it needs that fat, I think) and some strongly flavoured things go into a sealed jar, and are cooked at pressure until rendered delicious; conveniently, this also kills off botulinum spores. I wanted to try this with the pomegranate mackerel recipe, but I could get neither mackerel nor pomegranate molasses; instead, I’m trying chunks of salmon with fermented pepper paste, blood orange juice, and a few other things. I have high hopes.
Thom Eagle 