Damn you, fugu!

DAMN YOU, FUGU!

Two weeks before the word “Sandy” entered our disaster lexicon I made an important culinary discovery in the Smithsonian of culinary discoveries, the market streets of Chinatown in New York City. Chinatown, Jake—where I discovered black moss in heavy syrup and sea cucumber, a foot-long ocean bottom slug. Without going into the whys and wherefores of how these two failed to inspire me, let me say that stumbling over a reappearance of local blowfish tails made up for all the weirdness that the neighborhood’s “tastes” had presented me with over the years.

Blowfish. The name that suggests the term, “tastes like chicken” and conjures the memory of the soft fragrant flesh of the little “garbage fish” that started to catch on—at least in my kitchen-- in the 1970s. Fluke, flounder, sea bass, hake, blues—that was what we were after in fishing excursion boats out of Sheepshead Bay and other such launching berths along the northeastern US shoreline. And if we happened to pull up an ugly sea robin or blowfish, it was usually back it went. Unless we needed chum, in which case its fate was sealed.

And then one day in 1968, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at a fish store, I saw a fish I could afford for my new family. It was a pile of freshly skinned blowfish, of all things—a choice that at first repulsed me. But when I saw the boneless state of the meat and the price--only thirty-nine cents a pound—I gave them a try. I cooked them up exactly how the fishmonger suggested. Dredged in a little flour and salt and pepper, then lightly fried in a pan with some butter, they were amazingly tasty, and soon became a staple at our table.

When I moved from Newark to New York City in 1970 I had a little difficulty locating the little tail-meat filets, but diligence paid off. By the late 70s, however, they were going for close to four bucks a pound. People were catching on….

And then the damned fugu swam into town.

This is not entirely true. No fugus are swimming in these parts. They live primarily in the Sea of Japan, or thereabouts. But when the sushi craze started catching on in the 80s, Japanese chefs began importing the meat of this Asian puffer, or blow fish. And then the legends started spreading.

To begin with, you should know that cleaning puffer fish or blowfish is not easy. They have rubbery skin like a catfish, which is what allows them to puff up to four or five times their size and thus dissuade predators. When it comes to the Japanese blowfish and its North Atlantic cousin, however, that’s where the comparison ends.

Unfortunately, the public has remained in the dark about this.

The key difference is that there is nothing at all lethal about our local native species, while the fugu, not properly prepared, can kill you. This is because the liver/bile sac organ of the fugu contains a deadly poison, which makes cleaning the fish a critical process; one nick of the liver and the bile that escapes will taint the fish’s flesh to where a single morsel could kill a person. A slight hint of this poison is sought after by some foodies—enough to just cause some numbness of the lips and tongue. (To each his own!)

Atlantic blowfish come cheap, but imported fugu served in sushi restaurants, due to all the precautions, is expensive. However this is all academic, since most New York sushi restaurants forgo the delicacy so as not to worry their customers. The words fugu and blowfish, therefore, became synonymous. And blowfish disappeared entirely from the stands of local fishmongers.

Until last year, 2012, when they began to appear in a single fish store on Grand Street, just east of the D/B train stop. I rejoiced, bought about a dozen small filets and greedily headed home for a great fish dinner. The first batch got cooked up about two weeks before Sandy, the super-storm, hit. The fish store became my champion. I was delighted with this return to sanity, this reemergence of a worthy fish.

I went back a second time. Then, less than a week before Sandy, I bought five pounds. You might say so what, but if you knew my freezer, you’d realize that this—what with all the individual wrapping of the 35-40 little filet-tails—would take up the bulk of my space. And that’s just what it did.

Suddenly, on October 28, 2013, we had no power.
Gas still came through my stove jets, so I could cook--and it suddenly became necessary to cook up whatever I could in my fridge, lest it rot. The blowfish filets were dredged and fried by candlelight and carried floor-to-floor by flashlight, as I fed whoever was still at home in my five-story walkup. I wondered about some—those whose eyebrows lifted when I said “blowfish”—as an awareness of poisonous fugu was more common than any knowledge of this long-disappeared local delicacy.

A few days later, as I strolled along the river wall at Hudson River Park to see firsthand the damage the storm had done to our cherished shoreline, I came upon something called the “Wetlab”—a location at the end of one of our piers that’s financed by various environmental agencies to monitor aquatic life in  local rivers and streams. They have what amounts to an aquarium there on the Hudson, and while it’s not structured for the public’s viewing (fish swim in muddy tanks) they welcome visitors and questions.

So I found a qualified and certified and fish-fried ichthyologist and put the question to him.

Those who remain skeptical can always visit the pier laboratory at the end of West Houston Street and ask the same question I did. You will get this answer: “There is no connection between the Japanese fugu and the North Atlantic blowfish, or puffer fish. You can eat the latter without a worry.”

Tell the paranoid public that! I guess fear won out in the end, and that I was one of the little fish store’s only customers last fall, because a half dozen visits there and elsewhere over the fall of 2013 have turned up zip.

I get blank ESL stares when I ask them about it. “Blue fish?” they ask.

Damn you, fugu!