[Sca-cooks] Dried fish question

[Alec Story]

If you're dealing with fish labeled only in Chinese in your market, I'd be
happy to look up the characters for you, if you can send a picture or
something.  Unfortunately, pearl mullet is not in the most common online
dictionary of Chinese that most sites use.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 4:48 PM, Galefridus Peregrinus <
galefridus at optimum.net> wrote:

> A few years ago, I participated in a seige cookery challenge at Pennsic,
> in which the person issuing the challenge supplied the food that we, the
> participants, were required to cook. One of the ingredients was a variety
> dried fish that had been acquired at the challenger's local Middle Eastern
> grocery, which I prepared using the al-Baghdadi recipe. I will make
> inquiries to see whether she recalls anything about the fish, and report my
> findings.
>
>
> -- Galefridus
>
> Message: 1
>> Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 20:27:06 -0700
>> From: David Friedman To: Cooks within the SCA Subject: [Sca-cooks] Dried
>> fish question
>> Message-ID: <55EFA70A.4050709 at daviddfriedman.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
>>
>> Al-Baghdadi has a recipe for Maqluba al-tirrikh, which involves frying
>> tirrikh, a kind of fish, boning it, crumbling it, mixing in eggs and
>> spices, and frying it. We've made it in the past using the Arberry
>> translation. Since we had no source for tirrikh we made maqluba al-catfish.
>>
>> Looking at Perry's newer translation, I noticed that tarrikh are dried
>> fish of a particular variety. We are always interested in ways of managing
>> Pennsic without a cooler, so dried fish sounded interesting?the more so
>> since one of our campmates does not eat meat but does eat fish.
>>
>> Our local Chinese supermarket carries a number of different varieties of
>> dried fish, most of them in the refrigerated section. I got one yesterday
>> from an unrefrigerated shelf and tried making a small amount of the recipe.
>> The result was not tasty?and the smell in the kitchen unpleasant.
>>
>> 1. Does anyone have any information on what tirrikh were like, hence what
>> varieties of fish would be closest? Perry, in an old correspondence I had
>> with him, mentioned that salted fish from the relevant lake are still sold
>> in Istanbul under the name "kefal," which is the name of the grey mullet.
>> He doesn't know if what are now sold are the same as what were called
>> tirikh, and the grey mullet is a salt water fish, but it at least suggests
>> the possibility of looking for a fresh water fish in some way similar to
>> the mullet. Of course, even if I did that, I would still have the problem
>> of figuring out what kind of fish are in the packages of dried fish in the
>> Chinese grocery store.
>>
>> 2. Al-Baghdadi's recipe starts by frying the tirrikh, then boning it. The
>> dried fish I got was very dry, like wood. That made me wonder if either
>> something softer was being used or if the fish was rehydrated and then
>> fried and al-Baghdadi didn't bother to mention the first step.
>>
>> Comments? Is anyone here better informed about dried fish than I am?
>>
>> Incidentally, the grocery also had something labeled stockfish. I believe
>> it said it was salted. So another project is to find a period recipe that
>> says how to treat stockfish?I'm pretty sure I've seen one.
>>
>> --
>> David Friedman
>> www.daviddfriedman.com
>> http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
>>
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-- 
Alec Story