A Translucent and Rosy Whiteness

In England we are unsure about hake, some think it inferior to cod. Jane Grigson makes the unusual lapse of dismissing it as ‘Monday fish, hardly worth elevating to Friday’, a phrase that brings to mind the dull cod that we had for school supper on Fridays. Perhaps it is a matter of the freshness of the fish. When hake is fresh and has a glorious, almost translucent and rosy whiteness to the firm flesh, it is magnificent. If it is the sort of tired grey cadavers that might have been laid out on the fishmon- ger’s slab of yore, it would hardly be fit for any day of the week. It is a sad irony that now, due to refrigerated transport, fish is much fresher, but there is so much less of it about, and a lot fewer fishmongers.