More varieties of fish are being brought in by our fishermen and sold by our fishmongers and supermarkets than ever before. Trawling around the Cork market early one morning recently, I was amazed at the variety of fish lined up for sale, all from the boats coming in at Castletownbere.
Along with the first run of wild salmon, with its pale belly and blood-orange flesh, there was a small number of sea trout, which seem to have commenced a run this year, after vanishing for the past several years.
Impressively, there were hulking swordfish, their snouts snapped off so they could be accommodated in the boats, their grainy, rough skin matched by the beautiful, rotund tuna, with their dense, red-grey flesh.
There was also sea bream, shining silver and handsome, and nimble red mullet, one of the great fish of the Mediterranean.
We admired the mounds of little squid, red snapper, twitching Dublin Bay prawns, mighty brill and turbot, silvery hake, speckled mackerel, thrillingly ugly monkfish and sharp-finned john dory. It was a proverbial circus of the sea, a reproach to those who content themselves with cod, sole and plaice.
So, be adventurous when it comes to the glories of the sea, and if you are nervous about exploring new varieties, just follow these basic tips to get you started.
Bream
Baking suits the dense, sweet flesh of bream extremely well, and as the flesh is so firm it is a forgiving fish and difficult to get wrong. The bream I bought in the market, I baked with a Mediterranean melange: olives, sweet green pepper, tomatoes, onions, garlic and parsley, with a chopping of herbs shoved into the belly.
So, take a big baking dish which will accommodate the fish, oil it lightly, and scatter roughly chopped onion, garlic and parsley on the bottom. Chop thyme, oregano, parsley and marjoram, season the inside of the fish with salt and pepper and then shove in the chopped herbs.
Place the fish on the layer of chopped vegetables, and then on top place rings of sliced green pepper, wedges of tomato which have been seeded (and perhaps peeled, if you wish), more chopped onion, garlic and parsley and a handful of olives. Drizzle about half a cup of olive oil over, splash on a glass of white wine, scatter on some sea salt and bake in an oven preheated to 220C/ 430F/gas 6 for about 40 minutes, basting the fish with the liquids every 10 minutes.
The flavours will be very rich, so a starchy accompaniment is all you need: I served the fish with a straw potato cake. You can also bake bream on a bed of potatoes and onions: mix the sliced spuds and onions with garlic, parsley and olive oil and bake them for about 40 minutes, then place the fish on top and bake for another 30 minutes or so until cooked.
Tuna
When you think of tuna, think of fillet steak, for this fine fish behaves the same way in cooking. That is to say: it must be cooked rare to medium and if you cook it for too long, it will be dry and dreadful, just like an over-cooked steak. You should buy steaks a good inch thick, season them vigorously with salt and pepper, and cook in a little olive oil on a high heat for a minute each side. That's all.
Swordfish
Once again, over-cooking will reduce your swordfish steak to a cardboardy-flaky disaster, so think rare if you are frying or grilling it. However, swordfish can also be cooked as part of a casserole, surrounded by thinly sliced potato and onions and a persillade of garlic and parsley, with olive oil poured over, when it should be baked at 180 C/ 360F/gas 5 for an hour until the potatoes are tender. The Sicilians, who think of swordfish as the filet mignon of the seas, like to cook it with a tomato sauce enriched with capers and olives.
Red Mullet
Save the liver of red mullet, for it is a delicacy which should be cooked along with the fish. Grilling is perhaps the way to see this very firm-fleshed fish at its best, but to do this, cut two slits on each side of the fish through to the bone to make sure it cooks evenly and quickly. A good partner for the scene-stealing flavour of mullet is tapenade: grill the fish, and serve with a wedge of lemon and a spoonful of tapenade.
Squid
The rule with squid is simple: either you cook it on a high heat for a minute or two, or else you cook it for an hour. Anywhere in between and you will wind up with tyre rubber.
If you want to cook it fast, then slice the sacs into pieces, marinate with olive oil, lemon juice and chopped herbs and red pepper flakes, then cook over the highest heat in a pan or on a grill until it turns ghostly white, and it is ready.
When I last stuffed the sacs, I soaked some dried porcini, then chopped them and retained their cooking liquid. I chopped button mushrooms which I sauted in a little olive oil, then added the chopped porcini and their soaking liquid and cooked the two mushrooms on a high heat until the liquid had evaporated. I made a stuffing of coarse breadcrumbs, finely chopped garlic and parsley and the mushrooms, along with the chopped up tentacles of the squid, and stuffed the sacs with this mixture, then sewed them up at the top.
Then, I heated some olive oil in a pan, sauted the sacs for a few minutes over medium heat until they were lightly browned, then poured on a glass of white wine, turned the heat down to low, covered the pan and cooked for 45 minutes. At this stage, you should check to see if the sacs are tender: if not, give them another 10 minutes. If you have any stuffing mixture left over, then add it to the pan after 30 minutes: the bread will soak up the juices and enrich the sauce.
Prawns
Here is a technique for cooking prawns which I garnered from Richard Olney's last book, Reflexions. He learnt it from Alice Waters, who cooked dinner at Olney's house one evening back in 1993. She started with prawns which were grilled dry in fiercely heated frying pans thickly layered with coarse sea salt, less than a minute on one side, then on the other, only until the translucent shells turned pink and opaque. I have never since prepared them any other way.