Skate
Take enough skate, according to your needs, and put in pot of boiling water with plenty of salt. Boil for about 20 minutes, then take skate out and place in a large platter; chop up a little garlic and parsley and sprinkle over fish; then season with paprika and a little vinegar and serve with pieces of lemon.
A plain poached skate wing dressed while still warm. Two things decide whether it works: the freshness of the fish and how gently it is cooked.
- Buy the wing, and buy it freshSkate is sold as the pectoral "wing," usually skinned, at roughly 8-10 oz per person. Like other rays and sharks it carries urea in its flesh, which breaks down into ammonia as it ages; a faint ammonia smell at the counter means it is past its best and no amount of vinegar will fix it. A brief soak in acidulated water is the traditional remedy for a slight whiff, but fresh fish needs nothing.
- SourcingSeveral large skate species are now severely depleted and some are protected. Ask what species you are buying and choose one that is currently fished sustainably in your region.
- Poach, do not boilA hard boil shreds the delicate fibres away from the cartilage before they are cooked through. Bring the water to a boil, salt it well, then drop to a bare shiver and slide the wing in.
- Twenty minutes is too longThat timing suits a whole thick wing off a large fish. A skinned wing of ordinary thickness needs 8-12 minutes at a simmer; it is done when the flesh lifts off the cartilage in ribs with a little pressure from a knife tip.
- The cartilageSkate has no bones, only a fan of soft cartilage running through the wing. Lift the cooked flesh off the top face in strips, then turn the fan over and take the second layer. The cartilage itself is edible but rubbery and usually discarded.
- Season it hotDrain the wing thoroughly and dress it the moment it hits the platter, while it is still steaming: the raw garlic, chopped parsley, paprika and vinegar bloom against the heat. Cold skate takes dressing badly and turns gelatinous.
- Raw garlic"A little" means a little. One clove, finely chopped or crushed to a paste with salt, is enough for two wings; more will bury the fish. A spoonful of olive oil with the vinegar softens the edge and helps carry the seasoning.
- YieldOne good wing serves one as a main course or two as a starter. Serve with boiled potatoes or bread to take up the vinegar.
Skate is a fish that cheap cookery has always liked and grand cookery has mostly ignored: no bones to pick, no scaling, and for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries little money. It is a forgiving fish, the sort of thing a household could put on the table without much skill. The treatment here, boiled then dressed hot with garlic, parsley, paprika and vinegar, is closer to Mediterranean and Latin practice than to the French, where the same fish is more often browned in butter and finished with vinegar as raie au beurre noir. Both versions use acid; it is often suggested that vinegar or lemon offsets the faint ammoniac note skate develops within a day or two of being caught, though this is an explanation offered after the fact rather than a documented origin for the pairing.