The other reason of course is the bones. Though the
compact, strongly flavoured flesh of this member of the oily mackerel
family is delicious and unforgettable, you have to contend with an
astounding number of long vicious-looking bones that are most effectively
removed with the fingers. Which is fine at a braai, but not something you
can expect clients to do when they’re eating in a five-star set-up, says
Grant Cullingworth, executive chef of the Table Bay Hotel.
Chef Grant Cullingworth of the Table
Bay opts for Snoek and
Sweetcorn Frikadelle, served with carrot, dhania and cumin seed salad,
apricot ice cream and sweet chilli and apricot konfyt.
“In a restaurant it’s difficult to serve snoek as
a portion fish because of those bones. You have to flake it or do it as a
mousse,” says Cullingworth. He thinks it handles best smoked. “We
smoke it ourselves in the smoker in the butchery, along with our salmon
and our biltong and droe wors.”
Since the diversity of Cape cuisine is something the
Table Bay likes to emphasise, the dish Cullingworth comes up with for us
is inevitably traditional: Snoek and Sweetcorn Frikadelle. It’s now on
the menu of the hotel’s Conservatory restaurant.
Cullingworth makes his frikadelle with smoked snoek,
and serves them with apricot ice cream and sweet chilli and apricot
konfyt. It’s his elaborately titillating take on the classic West Coast
combination of jam with fish, a combo that might boggle the mind but works
magic on the tastebuds.
Chef Stephen Templeton of the Mount
Nelson chooses Smoked
Snoek and Tuna Sushi served with fresh oyster sauce and mango compote.
The Mount Nelson’s Stephen Templeton turns out to
be not only a great snoek fan but also a great snoek angler. “I’ve
caught snoek in Gordon’s Bay and it’s hell,” says this blond British
boykie, grinning broadly. “You work your butt off. There are spikes all
over them and they’re devils. You bleed all over the place.”
Yet it’s evidently worth it. “Snoek roe is
delicious, a delicacy,” he says. “The fishermen fry it and eat it with
bread.”
He learnt the secrets of cooking snoek from Ralph
Cupido at Spier in the days of the traditional South African buffet at
Jonkershuis restaurant.
“That man could do the most amazing things with
snoek. One of his best snoek dishes was with homemade apricot preserves.
He soaked the fish in milk and flavoured it with onions and bay leaves.”
Though Templeton’s cooks at the Nellie do a nice
take on smoor snoek in the Oasis buffet, using Chinese cabbage and marogo,
the wild African Swiss chard, instead of the traditional flaked onions and
potatoes, the head chef chose to dream up something different for this
feature.
“I wanted to do something more funky and fun,” he
says, “so I made a smoked snoek mousse, froze it, wrapped it in sea weed
and served it with a wild oyster on a bed of seaweed. It needs a bit of
sweetness, so I served it with a mango compote.”
Chef Bruce Robertson of the Cape
Grace devises Snoek and
Smoked Poor Man’s Caviar Terrine, served with a cream of cocktail
oysters, shark biltong and freshly squeezed lemon.
Smoked snoek is also the choice of the Cape Grace’s
Bruce Robertson. He puts it into a layered terrine, combining it with
aubergine, which he considers a complimentary texture, and wraps it all in
nori sheets and spinach leaves.
A chef renowned
for his quirky approach to food,
Robertson says it’s high time South Africa restaurants were more
adventurous. “Snoek is a lekker fish, very versatile. We must use more
of it, and not just in smoked snoek pate.”
And he puts his money
where his mouth is: certainly
he must be the first chef in the world to serve his customers bokkom –
those tiny harders that are salted and dried on the line in the wind like
washing, until they look like catfood and taste like fish biltong,
distinctly smelly. I’d have thought you’d only find them tasty if you
were shipwrecked off Yzerfontein with nothing to eat for a week, but
Robertson says he can turn them into a delicious bokkom veloute that goes
very well with abalone carpaccio.
One area where I agree with him though is smoked
snoek. It’s on a more epicurean stretch of turf altogether than any
other way of eating snoek - fried,
braaied, grilled, baked, curried or pickled. In fact it’s
arguably one of South Africa’s most valuable culinary assets, far
outstripping biltong, which comes closer to leather than food, and
bobotie, that spicy-custard-and-sawdust thing which is only edible when
some imaginative chef has fiddled with the traditional ingredients.
We could be getting a lot more global mileage out of our smoked snoek. It
could be known around the world as a South African delicacy, as instantly
recognisable as for example the rubbery escargots of France, which for
flavour and texture it beats hands down. The trouble is that like
everything else, we tend to downplay the local. Take Parma ham. If those
much-praised slices of raw aged pig from Parma were aged in Salt River,
the chances are we wouldn’t think they were terribly special.
Distance does lend enchantment.
Whenever I’ve been
living abroad, smoked snoek has been one of the Cape Town tastes I’ve
missed most. And I’m not the only one, as I discovered recently when an
ex-pat friend in New York sent me a New Yorker article by American
columnist Calvin Trillin.
Written with dry humour, it tells of how Trillin’s
friend Jeffrey Jowell, who grew up in Cape Town and is now a distinguished
London law professor, has for the past 30 years experienced intense
yearnings for the snoek of his home town, particularly smoked.
On holiday visits he always goes in search of snoek.
He and Trillin go on what the columnist describes as “a sort of snoek
tour” of Cape Town, trying it out in places as far-ranging as the
Barnyard Farmstall in Tokai, the food booths on the Parade outside the
City Hall and the Olympia Café in Kalk Bay. At the Olympia, one of the
chefs tells Trillin that the reason the restaurant never features snoek as
the linefish of the day is because “White people won’t eat snoek.”
They also visit Palace
Fisheries, specialists in
smoked snoek. It’s in Lower Main Road, Salt River, not the usual
stamping ground of law professors and upmarket New York media types. But
Palace Fisheries comes highly recommended, and it seems the visitors get
not only a short course in curing snoek from the proprietor, Emanuel Dos
Santos, but also a delicious hunk of smoked snoek they decide is
considerably more delectable than the piece of fried snoek covered in
“plaster-cast batter” they’ve just had at Snoekies in Hout Bay.
Naturally, as a smoked snoek addict, I waste no time
in heading for sleazy Salt River.
The fish-and-chips shop turns out to be hardly big
enough to swing a sardine frankly, but Dos Santos, a stocky young
Portuguese with a bristling moustache, has become more famous in New York
than in Cape Town. Since the article appeared, people keep pitching up and
asking for him by name. He tells them “You must have been reading the
New Yorker. No-one around here knows me as Emanuel Dos Santos. They just
know me as Manny.”
He has a bewildering variety of customers.
One is as
skinny and dried out as the piece of repellent-looking salt snoek he buys
for a pittance. Made from snoek that’s gone pap, salt snoek is a poor
relation of smoked snoek. Dos Santos says “He eats it just like that, to
get rid of his hangover. It’s the salt.”
Palace Fisheries has been here
well over half a
century. The father of the Ferreira who currently owns it used to smoke
his snoek on the small wood fire at the back that they still use. One lone
black worker is there working with a load of about 60 gutted, opened-out
fish that Dos Santos got from the “langanaar,” the middle man who bids
for the fish when they come into harbour on small snoek boats, surrounded
by squealing seagulls.
Dos Santos keeps his prize fish, chunky and big, in
an old wooden cold room. The whole place is seriously antiquated but the
wedge of smoked salmon he cuts for me is heaven – thick and firm with
that distinctive smoked snoek flavour that your tastebuds never forget.
And considerably cheaper than anywhere else.
“It must always be moist,” he says. “If it’s
too dry it’s tasteless. The Muslim community like it quite pap, so they
can spread it on bread, but when it’s pap it doesn’t last as long.
Of course you get a lot of pap snoek - snoek with
worms – but it’s nothing, it’s never killed anyone.”
Except of course in the old saying, “Slat my dood
met ‘n pap snoek!”
“Hey,” he says, “I haven’t heard that saying
in years."
Catch
a blissful dose of spring fever in the September/October issue of Good
Taste magazine, the official publication of the Wine-of-the-Month Club.
Read all about edible flowers, the civilized ritual of High Tea, the new
chef at Melrose Arch Hotel, and much more! Available at selected Exclusive
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