Sea Bass

Shell beans are a big part of late summer and early fall in our kitchen. If you happen to come by Lucques on a slow night when they’re in season, you’ll see runners, cooks, and dishwashers gathered around huge piles of shell beans, shucking, shucking, shucking. For me, shucking provides a much-needed period when my hands can do the work and my brain takes a little time off. Don’t worry, shell beans for six won’t require a crew of shuckers.

These skewers of sea bass are seasoned with a North African condiment called charmoula and served over marinated eggplant and peppers. Charmoula, like so many Old World recipes, has as many versions as there are cooks. Although the proportions and some ingredients vary, everyone seems to agree that charmoula must have cilantro, garlic, cumin, and paprika and then be finished with olive oil and vinegar. One Sunday when we were working on this dish, Julie Robles, then sous-chef at Lucques, suggested adding rice wine vinegar to our charmoula experiment. It’s certainly not authentic, but we both liked the milder, sweeter nuance it gave the sauce. In fact, the charmoula was so good we decided to use it twice. First we marinated the fish in the spicy condiment (acid-free, so it wouldn’t “cook” the fish), and then, as we pulled the kabobs from the grill, we slathered them once again in charmoula.

Here I combine woody herbs with the potatoes and tender herbs with the fish. The result is an intensely flavorful and fragrant dish.

Subtle, calming, and healthful, this clear soup is a home remedy for alleviating stress. The ginger subdues nausea, aids digestion, and stimulates circulation; the fish balls provide protein to relieve hunger; and the mushrooms and spinach enliven the broth to make the remedy more than palatable, indeed desirable. How simple. How soothing. The spinach roots add an elusive textural dimension to the broth. Not exactly crunchable, they are nonetheless more chewable than spinach leaves. They are available at the bottom of ordinary bunch spinach sold with roots attached. Cut them off to use in the soup and save the leaves for another dish.

Delicately flavored avocado oil can lose its personality when heated; pour a touch of the oil over food just before serving.

Cooking a fish whole is the best way to ensure it will stay moist and flavorful, and the process is a lot less intimidating than it looks. Branzino is a small Mediterranean sea bass with a mild flavor and delicate texture, enhanced here with a bright, fresh stuffing of fennel and lemon. Todd says he always feels like he’s on a diet when he eats fish, so I cook it with some pancetta to hearty up the dish a bit. Do watch out for small bones when you serve the branzino.

If you have forgotten how delicious a fillet of fish can be, do this: Steam it, with nothing. Drizzle it with olive oil and lemon. Sprinkle it with salt. Eat it. If the number of ingredients and technique are minimal, the challenge is not. You need a high-quality and uniformly thick piece of fish to begin with, your timing must be precise—which is all a matter of attention and judgment, really—and your olive oil flavorful. That taken care of, there is no better or easier preparation.

Try to use branches of fresh oregano, marjoram, or fennel here; they really make a tremendous difference. The first two are grown by many gardeners, and a good gardener can probably spare some. Bronze—herb—fennel grows wild all over southern California and is easy to find (it’s also grown by some gardeners). Occasionally you can find one of these in a big bunch at a market, too; you’ll need a big bunch to try the grilling option. In any case, choose a fish with a simple bone structure so it can be served and eaten easily. The best for this purpose are sea bass, red snapper, grouper, striped bass, and mackerel. One advantage in using the oven over the grill is that in roasting you can add some peeled, chunked potatoes to the bottom of the roasting pan as well; they’ll finish cooking along with the onions.

We tend to think of grilling as the ideal way to cook many foods, but the broiler is more valuable when you want to save a marinade and the fish’s pan juices. A recipe like this one was originally cooked in a pan over an open fire, and you can certainly follow that tradition, but the broiler makes quick work of it. Though the dish is French, it’s very southern, and I might serve a simple pasta beforehand; Tomatoes Provençal (page 494) would also be in the right spirit, as would a simple salad.

Couscous is a small pasta—not a grain as most people believe—as well as the name of almost every North African dish that contains it. So there are innumerable fish, vegetable, meat, and chicken couscous dishes (see pages 526 to 527 for a couple of others). You can cook the couscous separately (see page 526) or steam it on top of the simmering stew, a nice touch for which you will need either a special utensil called a couscoussière or a steamer rigged inside of a covered pot in which you cook the sauce. If you are not comfortable cooking pieces of whole fish, substitute a firm fillet like red snapper or grouper and reduce the fish cooking time to about 10 minutes; do not overcook.

Dates, of course, are a staple food of the Sahara and many other deserts; they grow on palm trees, keep forever, and, to nomads, are far more important than any bread product. But only in coastal North Africa and parts of the Middle East does date country meet the sea and a dish like this come about. Substitute prunes for dates if you prefer. A simple pilaf, chosen from among those on pages 513 to 514, would be great here, as would Houria (page 191).

Lemongrass, the seasoning most closely associated with Southeast Asia, plays a major role here, despite the presence of many other ingredients. Nothing else “cleans” the taste of the fish quite like it. Serve with any rice dish.

The highlight of many meals in Chinese restaurants, yet few dishes are easier to prepare at home. Start with a medium-sized firm-fleshed fish—black bass and red snapper are ideal, but grouper or, if you can find it, small striped bass, are also good—preferably with its head on (if the head won’t fit in your steamer, cut it off, along with the tail). Scales must be removed and the fish must be thoroughly cleaned; any fishmonger can do this for you. Serve the fish with white rice and, preferably, a few other Chinese dishes.

It doesn’t take long, but this dish requires a fairly large pan. A long, narrow roasting pan will do in a pinch, especially if it’s nonstick. If you have trouble getting the fish to fit into your pan, by all means cut off its head and tail. Or try making this with smaller fish, in the 2- to 3-pound range. Then, when you feel you’ve gotten the hang of browning a whole fish, move on to larger specimens. This is a blast to eat—and should have enough sauce to make plain white rice a terrific accompaniment. A simple Chinese-style vegetable like Snow Peas with Ginger (page 470) would make the meal even better.

An unexpected but delicious use for hard-cooked eggs that, of course, can be made in advance. If you have fish stock, poach the fish in it, but if you don’t, don’t worry about it. Serve this with plain boiled potatoes.

Think of this as a simpler take on paella. It’s Eastern European in origin, so it was often made with freshwater fish, but you can use any fillets you want. With a salad, this is a wonderful—and very fast—one-pot meal. If you’re using water instead of stock, you might augment its flavor slightly by simmering it for 15 minutes with a carrot, an onion, and a celery stalk, along with a few peppercorns, a garlic clove, a bay leaf, and a teaspoon of vinegar; strain before proceeding. If you don’t have time for this, that’s fine too—the dish will still be good, even if you just use water.

Almonds grow abundantly in Spain—you see the trees throughout the South and easily find fresh almonds, which are a rarity here—and play an integral role in many dishes, offering a rich flavor and body to sauces. This dish is a perfect weeknight offering, but it’s also a fine main course at a dinner party. I like monkfish here, but striped bass, grouper, red snapper, and black sea bass are all suitable; each will cook at slightly varying rates (the monkfish will take the most time, red snapper the least). This is wonderful over either white rice or a pilaf (page 513) or with crusty bread.

A lovely, flavorful, and colorful sauce with an elusive perfume that is the result of the saffron-vinegar combination. This is suitable for any firm-fleshed fish fillet. If you make the variation with the potato salad, you’d pretty much have a one-dish meal here; bread and salad would be nice additions.

Classically, meunière refers to fillets of sole that are floured and quickly sautéed in clarified butter, then finished with parsley, lemon juice, and a little melted butter. Over the years the definition has expanded to encompass a series of flexible techniques that can be applied to just about any thin cut of meat, poultry, or fish.You can serve this with a salad and bread, or with any good potato and vegetable combination. True sole is a uniquely firm fish, best replaced not by local “soles” (like gray sole or Pacific sole) but by sturdy fillets like red snapper, grouper, catfish, black-fish, or sea bass.