Pan-Fried Red Mullet

“Everyone who was born in Odesa knows how to fry fish, it’s in our blood,” an Odesan food guide named Yulia told me when I naively asked her who taught her to fry fish so well. When one grows up in a communal flat, like Yulia and so many other Odesans, where all the neighbors fry fish in the same large kitchen at the same time during that particular fish season, you learn how to cook fish by default—you have no other option! Freshness is really the most imp