A huge baked red snapper

When I lived near Brixton, we often used to get red snapper from the market on a Saturday morning.  I used to love getting the bus up to Brixton station and wandering round the indoor market, then down through Electric Avenue.  The shops and stalls were always full of interesting things, catering for the large West Indian and Asian communities of the area.
It always used to amuse the elderly West Indian ladies that a man was out shopping for dinner for the family, and they were always interested in what I was cooking.  While they stocked-up with cases of mackerel, slabs of salt fish and boxes of frozen snapper - enough to feed an army it seemed - I would be buying my two sea bass, or a couple of snappers or maybe a small octopus.  I remeber having an interesting conversation with an old lady who wanted to know what I did with bass - she'd never bought one before, but I couldn't convince her to take one home that day.

The snapper I used to buy in Brixton were small - individual portion sized.  I couldn't help myself the other day when I was passing Jarvis Fish in Norbiton and I saw this monster.  With my parents over for dinner that evening, I was inspired to buy this huge fish and share it among the four of us.  It must have weighed a couple of kilos and had delicious creamy white flesh and that beautiful red skin.

One thing about a mature snapper like this:  Watch out for the scales!  Although the fishmonger gave it a good scaling, there were still plenty of the armour plates on the fish when I got home.  Each one the size of a fingernail, transparent and hard as iron it seemed.  You really don't want a mouth full of these.

So how to deal with this sea monster?  Well, when the fish is as good and fresh as this, the answer has to be 'simply'.  All I did (after removing fins and gills) was season it inside an out, push a small sprig of rosemary in the gut cavity, lay over a few branches of thyme and marjoram and the smallest sprinkling of saffron - finished with a drizzle of olive oil and a few sliced black olives.  Then it went into the oven, covered with foil for about half an hour. 

The result was fantastic.  Just enough saffron and herbs to give a mysterious background flavour, and baked for just long enough to be cooked through but still moist.  A few more olives wouldn't have gone amis.

And please - don't forget the head.  Like so many fish, there is really good eating round the head.  Look for little pockets of dense flesh around the cheeks and above the eye...  

tags: fish  

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