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Skate Fish-Indian Style
Chop onion, garlic, little bacon, curry powder; add little water and fry in pan until onion is brown. Take pieces of skate and place in stewing pot, then add ingredients to fish and let cook about 15 minutes, slow fire.
A terse curried fish stew of the kind written down for cooks who already knew the method. The gaps worth filling are the quantities, the state of the skate, and the fact that skate goes off faster than most fish.
- Buy skate already skinnedWhat the fishmonger sells as skate is the wing, a fan of flesh striped over a sheet of cartilage. Ask for it skinned on both sides; two wings of about 8 oz each will serve two, and the flesh pulls off the cartilage in ribbons once cooked.
- Freshness is not optionalSkate converts urea to ammonia as it ages, so a wing past its best smells sharply of it. A faint whiff soaks out in cold acidulated water; a strong one means the fish should be discarded rather than cooked.
- Quantities for the aromaticsFor two wings: one medium onion, two cloves of garlic, two rashers of bacon cut small, and one to two teaspoons of curry powder. "Little water" here means a couple of tablespoons, enough to keep the spice from scorching.
- Fry the powder, do not just add itThe hinge of the dish. Commercial curry powder tastes raw and dusty unless it cooks in the bacon fat for a minute or two before liquid goes in. The instruction to fry until the onion browns is what makes the difference.
- "Slow fire" means a bare simmerOn a gas or electric hob, the lowest setting that keeps the surface trembling. Skate is delicate and a hard boil shreds it off the cartilage into the sauce.
- Fifteen minutes is generousFifteen minutes is ample -- a thick wing wants 10-15 minutes; thinner tail ends may be done in 8. The flesh is ready when it lifts cleanly from the cartilage with the point of a knife.
- Liquid and servingAs written this is nearly dry-braised. Adding half a cup of water, stock or coconut milk gives enough sauce for rice, though the recipe itself specifies no accompaniment. Serves two.
"Indian style" in an American or British household book of this vintage usually means nothing more specific than commercial curry powder, a blend advertised for sale in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward and by 1900 a standard grocery item rather than an exotic one. The pairing with bacon is thoroughly domestic: it supplies the frying fat and the salt in one stroke. Skate was cheap fish, and in Britain and the northeastern United States it was commonly robustly seasoned rather than served plain, partly because of its faint ammoniacal edge. Curry powder, garlic and bacon all pull in the same direction, and the result is closer to an Anglo-Indian kitchen supper than to anything cooked in India.