You may have heard of Rastamouse. He is a children’s TV character
who is surreptitiously teaching morality to the kids in between saying “irie”
lots and jamming with his band the Easy crew. His
catchphrase is “make a bad thing good” and generally he says this about ten
times per episode, whilst encouraging other characters to right the wrongs that
they have caused. A nice sentiment, I’m
sure you’d agree.
On Friday night, I couldn’t sleep at all. I think I got
about three hours in and then I was wide awake, irritating him indoors with my
fidgeting and messing about on my phone (reading the Daily Mail website to my
shame). When it got to about 5:30am, with Rasta’s wise words ringing in our ears,
we decided to make lemonade from the lemons handed to me by the gods of sleep and
go for a trip to Bilingsgate
Market - London’s biggest wholesale
fish market. Given that it’s over by the time I’m usually out of bed on a Saturday,
this was going to be my best chance of getting my hands on some of the “widest
selection of fish in the UK.”
This wasn’t a minor undertaking as it is MILES away in
Canary Wharf and I had to fight my inherent laziness and predisposition to
staying in bed as long as humanly possible. But once we were committed to our choice
it was actually quite exciting and I had that feeling that you get in your stomach
when you wake up really early to go on holiday. So we boshed down the empty
streets of Shepherds Bush to the tube with our cool bag full of ice packs in readiness
for the delicious beasts that would become our dinner.
The market
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| The view from the carpark. Billingsgate used to be in the City of London, and moved to what was to later become Canary Wharf in 1982, leading to the fishmongers claiming that wherever they go, the global financial industry follows. |
Billingsgate is a little oasis of awesome in the middle of
the sterile desert of Canary Wharf – possibly my least favourite part of
London. It just appears out of nowhere when you turn a corner; this huge 80s
airport hangar-style building. We got there just after 7am, and the number of
people bustling around was quite surreal. It reminded me a bit of some of the
markets we went to in Malaysia, but I was a bit delirious from sleep
deprivation and everything was reminding me of something else. I was also
banging on about what I would be able to trade when we go back to a bartering
economy – turns out all I have is mediocre knitting skills. Oh well.
We were a bit worried that we had missed the bulk of the action,
as the market gets going at 5am, but such concerns were unfounded and we got our
beaks stuck into sniffing some snappers!
How it goes down
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| Checking out the goods. |
There are loads of different traders who set out their catch
for your perusal. There are some touting stuff caught in the UK the day before,
some who specialised in smoked fish, others selling salt cod, and
a fair few who were selling massive
prawns and other exotica from Asia. Each of the merchants has different
stuff, so you have to do a couple of looking-only laps first, play the field a
bit, before committing any cash, lest you find that the cockles at the next
stall look more cockly than the ones you just bought. A friend asked us
afterwards if it was intimidating, and it actually wasn’t at all, there was a
bit of inter-fishmonger banter, and it was all quite chilled and friendly. The market is geared towards restaurants, fishmongers and other food professionals though, so you have to make smaller purchases from those willing to sell by the fish as well as by the (massive) box. Oh and be careful not to get in the way of the market porters moving the big boxes from the storerooms; "mind your legs please love".
What we bought
- Dover Sole – Three
whole dover sole, about 400g each for £12. Apparently James Bond’s favourite fish.
- Turbot – One whole Turbot, a grey flat fish , for £8. I think it was farmed as it didn't say otherwise, and I saw an enormous wild turbot on sale for twice the price on a different stall. Even so, ours is a beast, it weighs nearly a kilo! A fact for you fishy fact fans is that flatfish (such as turbot) start their lives with one eye on each side of their head, like most fish, but as they get older one of their eyes travels through their body so that both eyes are on the top. Magical and disgusting.
- Mussels – 5 kilos of mussels rope-grown in Lewis, Scotland for £9.50. They had a tag on them that said they were gathered on 6th September (Thursday). So pretty fresh. They smell amazing, like seawater and are really shiny, like those chocolates in the shape of shells.
We wanted to get some razor clams, but they sold out by the
time we went back to get them. Let that be a lesson to you all, don’t let the
razor clams be the ones that got away from you too.
Pitstop
Like getting a reward hotdog at the end of an Ikea trip, we were
feeling like we deserved some breakfast based nourishment, and headed to one of the caffs in the market. Iain mentioned
that when he was there before, he got a mackerel bap and I had my heart set on
getting one. The first establishment we went into had a fishy full English on
the menu, but that isn’t what I was promised and I stormed out of there as fast
as permitted by my piscine burden (5 kilos of mussels is quite a load). The next place was more my scene, and though
there was no mackerel bap on offer, we got a bacon sarnie with added....scallops.
Incredible. I felt like a true Eastender
sat in there with my cuppa cha and fishy bacon sandwich.
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| Do try this at home. |
Cooking that stuff
Last night we took our haul to our friend Sam’s house and
there proceeded to cook up a storm, making half of the mussels into classic
moules marineres and grilling the sole on the bone in the 'classic' style loved by Mr Bond. We felt like
the Henry VIII of seafood. We poured the leftover marineres sauce over new potatoes; this was a revelation. This was also a good opportunity to use lots of herbs from our newly established herb garden.
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| Iain is convinced our mint is a Triffid due to the attempts it makes at escaping from its pot. Trimming it back 'helps demonstrate our evolutionary superiority' apparently. He reads too much science fiction. |
In a previous job Iain did a course (at Billingsgate) called 'Knife skills for fish preparation' and now relishes an opportunity to deploy his knife skills and claims to enjoy it. Personally, I'm not that keen on getting so intimate with a raw fish.
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| I guess this is the disadvantage of buying non-mongered fish |
Here's a picture of the finished product before we demolished it all, but if there is interest we can do another post with more pictures and the recipes.
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| If I had a Delorean I would eat this again. Yes, I would risk a temporal paradox. |
So there you have it, my Saturday was saved from the jaws of defeat with the help of a fictional rastafarian mouse. One love!
CW
