Food I'm Eating: Sauce for Smoked Fish

I have a weakness for smoked fish for breakfast. I don't know if it comes from my Cornish ancestors, but a plate of fine kippers, toast, and tea has always seemed a morning treat. The last time I had truly great kippers was in 2010, visiting a friend who lives in Eastbourne, in England. Here in Northern California, while we can get excellent, local smoked salmon, kippers are hard to come by. However, I do get smoked sturgeon occasionally, which, sautéed in a touch of olive oil, can be delicious, but sturgeon tends to be dry. I recently looked up a recipe for a sauce for smoked fish that I tried today for the first time, thinking it might be a good way to counteract the dryness of the sturgeon. 

While I'd never ruin a good kipper with a sauce, and I think this recipe might be even better on an oilier fish than sturgeon (like smoked salmon), it turned out quite nicely. I finely minced equal parts of red onion and capers, and then added about half as much fresh horseradish, a few teaspoons of sherry vinegar (the recipe calls for red wine vinegar, but sherry vinegar is what I had in the house), and a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise. I was too lazy to pick a few leaves of parsley from the garden, but a little green would have been a nice touch. These ingredients all mixed together made a nice topping for my smoked sturgeon this morning. I can see this being good on almost any fish dish. Give it a try. 

Music I'm Listening to: Gil Shaham and Juraj Valčuha with the San Francisco Symphony

Last night, March 27, I attended a San Francisco Symphony concert featuring Gil Shaham as soloist in the Brahms Violin Concerto and, after intermission, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. Shaham, Valčuha, and the Symphony performers were in fine form. I had never heard of Valčuha before. According to the program notes, from 2016 to 2022 he was the music director of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and he has been the music director of the Houston Symphony since 2022.  I liked his approach. He elicited a rather clipped, precise phrasing from the orchestra in both pieces on the program that gave the performances a crispness I rather liked without sacrificing feeling in the more lyrical passages. A very enjoyable evening. 

Books I'm reading: Paw Paw: In search of America's Forgotten Fruit

Not long ago, on a visit to Petaluma (for what reason I no longer remember) I stopped into the large heirloom seed store there and saw on the front counter several copies of Andrew Moore's book Paw Paw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015). Having lived for some time in southwestern Ohio (in Dayton between the ages of 10 and 17), smack in the middle of the Paw Paw's native range, I have tasted a Paw Paw, although only once. I don't recall where the fruit I ate came from, but I vividly remember how pleasantly surprised I was by its exotic taste and its large, shiny, black seeds. That would have been sometime around 1976 or so. Later, as a student of Japanese at Ohio State University, I remember thinking of that one Paw Paw again when I came upon a Paw Paw tree on the OSU campus six or seven years later. Since then, I have off and on wondered about the Paw Paw. So, seeing this book in Petaluma, I purchased a copy, which I have just finished reading. The book is written in the first person and reads rather like a travelogue as the author criss-crosses the plant's range to talk with growers and enthusiasts and people who, like me, remember the Paw Paw but have lost touch with it, chronicling the fruit's history and its slow revival.

It's been 10 years since Moore's book was released. A few weeks ago I was able to go online and easily order a pair of Paw Paw trees to try in my California garden – cultivars that appear to have been just coming into the market at the time of the book's publication. That is evidence that Paw Paw development has continued and that this fruit, once common throughout its range, is making something of a comeback. I don't know how these trees native to the Midwestern US states will do in the hotter, drier climate here, but I'll do my best to nurture them. The trees arrived a few days ago. I planted them shortly afterward. I've enclosed them in cages to keep marauding deer away and given them some protection from the mid-day sun. The plants themselves are barely visible, but they're there.