It’s a great fish, I always associate it with Rhode Island, which make it even greater, and the Melissa Clark recipe I often use is just about the greatest.
So there.
- two 9-ounce tautog/blackfish fillets from American Seafood Company prepared using this recipe by Melissa Clark, as a model, laying the fish skinned side down and kept there without turning, and then, to be specific about the other ingredients I used, the fresh sage was from Phillips Farm; the olives were Gaeta, from Buon Italia, and the lemon juice was squeezed from a Whole Foods Market organic fruit, and I was able to use the elusive ‘Aleppo Syrian red pepper’ specified [I found some from Morton & Bassett at the Westside Market], and I added one fresh habanada pepper from from Norwich Meadows Farm
- two different varieties of small potatoes, pinto from Norwich Meadows Farm and satina from Keith’s Farm, scrubbed, boiled with a generous amount of salt until barely cooked through, drained, halved, dried while still inside the large still-warm vintage Corning Pyrex blue-glass Flameware pot in which they had cooked, tossed with some good Portuguese olive oil, sprinkled with sea salt, freshly-ground black pepper, and 3 garlic scapes from Berried Treasures Farm, cut into short sections, that had first been softened in a little warm olive oil, that had been softened by heating them in olive oil inside a much smaller Flameware glass pan, garnished with red micro radish from Norwich Meadows Farm
- two handfuls of wild miner’s lettuce [claytonia perfoliata] from Willow Wisp Organic Farm
- the wine was a California (Central Coast/Santa Ynez Valley) white, Rick Boyer Santa Ynez Valley Dry White Blend 2017, from Naked Wines
by Rick Boyer
- the music was Rossini’s last Italian opera, the 1823 epic Babylonian treasure, ‘Semiramide’ [“.. the last opera of the great Baroque tradition: the most beautiful, the most imaginative, possibly the most complete; but also, irremediably, the last” – musicologist Rodolfo Celletti], in a dazzling performance by Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
[the last image, a portrait of Rossini by, I believe, an unknown artist, painted at about the time he composed ‘Semiramide’, is from BolognaWelcome]