For junediamanti...

[fpb]

...who loves to post about food, and once or twice has more or less asked me to. Well, I do not have much to say about food except that I enjoy it; but recently I have made myself what my parents used to call "wartime fish", and I thought, perhaps JD might like to know about this.

I have only just begun to realize what a traumatic event the Second World War was for several members of my family, especially my father. (My mother was born a few months after the final surrender of Germany.) As children, they rarely ever spoke of their and their parents' memories. The war was something we saw in American movies and school textbooks. It did once happen that my father, hearing a harmless and indeed pacifist song on the TV, did practically lose his head and start shouting "What the Hell is this, a Nazi song? That is how Nazis used to sing!" I was a child at the time, and it did not occur to me to think that my father was six when the Nazis were driven from Rome - what must a child of six have gone through to remember Nazi singing all his life, and remember it with horror? That is not the only point I could make; let me just say that the horrors of the War were the invisible elephant in the room throughout my childhood, and that only now I can understand certain facts.

The only war memory that my parents enjoyed, and whose enjoyment they passed to us, was what we called "pesce de guera" (Roman dialect: wartime fish). Of course, one of the things that wartime was associated with were shortages and hunger; and wartime fish was one of the most effective ways to fight it. It is made with boiled potatoes, tinned tuna (the only kind of fish that was available in the dark days), some oil, and small amounts of mayonnaise, olives and any other garnish that will fit. You simply smash and mix together the potatoes, tuna and oil, shape it in the form of a fish, and use mayonnaise to outline the shape of a fish and the olives for eyes. It is delicious, cheap and filling, and its bulky and colourful aspect manages to make this produce of hunger and shortage look like a feast. As I recall it, it was a particular favourite of us children (we always, of course, fought over the "head" because of the olive "eyes"). I made it recently for myself, and it really is as good as I recalled it; only, since it is practically impossible to make a small amount of it - and it does not keep very well - it really is better to make it for a family meal or a group of friends.

Comments

Snoek

[camillofan.livejournal.com]

Calvin Trillin wrote about snoek for The New Yorker in this article. It's evidently a South African, er, delicacy; Britain's post-WWII relationship with the fish is addressed in the second and third paragraphs of the piece.

Re: Snoek

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That was fun and interesting. I knew about biltong, of course. And I knew about the miseries of the British post-war period. Astoundingly, rationing ended in Britain a good deal later than in the defeated countries, Italy and Germany - in 1954, even! It gives you a sense of where the rebellious generation of the sixties were coming from: all their childhoods must have been spent in uniform grey and genteel or proud-working-class poverty.