Essay

A fishy story

By Mike Dwane

I love fish so I consider it a great misfortune that I married a Japanese who can't eat it. This is like a Spaniard who can't stand ham or a Frenchwoman with no tolerance for cheese.

It's not my wife's fault. She loves the taste of fish but is allergic to it. Curiously, this condition does not extend to shrimp, scallops, crab, sea urchins, squid, oysters or other kinds of seafood which she devours with relish. But give her anything with fins and scales and she begins to swell like a puffer fish.

And so whenever she goes out for dinner with friends, it's time for a fish feast for me and my 2-year-old boy.

I had been waiting for the chance to try a recipe from my Mediterranean cookbook for some time. Monkfish with a clam-and-mussel broth infused with the world's most expensive spice — saffron.

I once stood in the famous Spice Market in Istanbul trying to work out how much it cost. Converting the lira into euro, I figured out that saffron would set you back as much in Turkey — where the average wage is one-third of Ireland's — as it would back home. I bought some pistachios instead.

And so when a colleague of mine announced she was going on holiday to India and asked if anybody wanted a souvenir, I jumped at the chance.

"Bring me back some saffron if it's not too expensive," I said, certain she would forget.

Three weeks later she arrived back with a single gram from Kashmir, which she said had been a bargain at euro6 (yen850).

Ireland being an island, we have no shortage of fish so I now had all the ingredients for my luxurious seafood stew. Or at least I thought I had.

My fishmonger gravely pointed to the weather outside and said he had no monkfish and no clams and wasn't expecting any in for the rest of the week. Storms had kept the fishermen in harbour and they were unlikely to venture out to sea again until the weather eased.

Ireland doesn't have typhoons but Atlantic storms can do a lot of damage. In the days before my fish supper plan, a motorist had been killed by a falling tree and a roof had collapsed at a train station.

Some flowerpots had blown over on my balcony, but no monkfish? That was a real disaster. I took the fishmonger's advice and bought cod as a substitute.

No sooner had I put it in the pan than the electricity cut out, apparently after a tree fell on a power line down the street!

We ate chicken sandwiches that night — with saffron mayonnaise on the side!

魚の話

日本人は魚好きというけれど、筆者の日本人の妻は魚がダメ。筆者自身は魚が大好きなので、妻が友達と食事に出かけていくと、ここぞとばかりに魚を食べる。先日、またそんな機会が巡ってきた。

The Japan Times ST: January 24, 2014