[Sca-cooks] Tuna, tuna, tuna

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Cynara commented:
>>Canned tuna doesn't taste the same as fresh cooked, but if the date sauce is
>>highly flavored it might not matter. I suggest that you try both fresh and
>>various kinds of canned WAY ahead of time -- invite your friends, and see
>>which is most popular.
>I;m not sure how the canned tuna would differ from the fresh stuff. 
>I'm not sure I've had fresh tuna. Since the tuna is canned in such 
>quantity, I suspect the fresh tuna, if not the sushi grade, may be 
>one of the least expensive fresh fishes.

Fresh tuna is a bit hard to describe. In sashimi grade (sushi being a 
rice preparation sometimes, but not always, garnished with raw or 
cooked fish, or any of several other items) tuna eaten raw, it's 
almost like raw beef. Cooked fresh tuna, if not conserved in oil, 
which is the style canned tuna attempts to imitate, with a fair 
degree of success in the better brands, has a texture almost like 
roast pork. In flavor it is, well, usually somewhat fishy, 
mineral-flavored. Often it is served grilled rare, to give the 
contrast in taste and texture between the cooked and almost-raw areas.

>If you use the canned tuna, I think you should use the type packed 
>in less oil (light?), perhaps one packed in water. And then 
>drain/press it? to remove the extra moisture/oil. I think a lot of 
>whether canned tuna will work as well or not as fresh is likely to 
>depend upon the exact recipe, which I don't believe was posted. If 
>it is meant to be served sliced that is different than if it is to 
>be pulverized and mixed with something.

You might actually get away with canned. I hate to say this, but 
contrary to what a lot of people may believe, if you were to put the 
dish made with canned tuna, left in recognizable chunks, and a 
nouvelle grilled rare tuna version of the same dish, in front of 
Pliny the Elder, I suspect he'd go for the canned. There's a lot of 
suspicion and distaste held today for canned tuna, not all of it 
justified. We see it all the time, it's cheap, it has no annual 
season worth remembering, and we tend to see it mostly as a cheap, 
filling, if somewhat bland protein source, something like hard-boiled 
eggs. <yum... I'm enthralled... you can tell, huh?> (This is not to 
say that modern people might not prefer fresh, if available, but it 
would be a different kettle of... you know.)

Period people, on the other hand, sometimes lived far from the sea, 
and were known to preserve tuna (to those inlanders something of a 
luxury item), often in barrels of oil (surprise, and welcome to the 
Mediterranean) and in brine (known to sodium-conscious modern 
Americans as water). Who do we think came up with these ideas, 
Clarence Birdseye??? A Bee, a Tuna, and a Mermaid? No, more likely 
the ancient Greeks, Phonecians [why does that not look correctly 
spelled?], and Romans. Apart from the tin can, the modern methods 
used have several parallels to period preserving and shipping 
practice (and are more effective, due to the can).

As far as modern-style-canned goes, you can sometimes find large tins 
of imported tuna, similar to the tins of salmon often seen in 
supermarkets. Latino and Asian markets sometimes sell comparable cans 
of tuna, in olive oil or in brine. My lady wife shoved under my nose 
a couple of weeks ago one of those national news magazines, I forget 
which, but it had an article on disappearing ocean resources and the 
commensurate rise in aquaculture. It mentioned tuna as a prime 
candidate for farming, and mentioned that the "solid white albacore" 
(has anyone else noticed it is getting less solid as the years pass?) 
and the "chunk light" varieties are in fact from different species, 
and not simply light and dark meat of a large animal that sports 
both, as many people, myself included, supposed. The suggestion seems 
to be that much of the white tuna eaten in the U.S. is Pacific 
bluefin and yellowfin, while the darker stuff is more often skipper 
tuna, tunny, bonito, etc., and that these are more often found in the 
Mediterranean. I'm working from memory here, but I guess my point in 
mentioning this is that the dark, fishy, stinky kind of tuna (one 
that would really benefit from a nice, fruity sauce), is probably 
what the Romans intended for this dish.

If you could find good-quality dark tuna, in olive oil or unabashedly 
canned in real brine, suitably drained, it might actually work out 
well, and it would also solve some of the cost issues. Whether or not 
people would prefer it to fresh, I don't know.

Adamantius