Sustainable eating with mackerel on toast

We have stopped eating the fish we love the most—pomfret and kingfish. With their firm, white texture, and posh aura, these species are the Ferrari and Bvlgari of Konkan dining, for long occupying pride of place at the tables of folk from the western coast. But with prices exceeding ₹1,000 per kg, they are mostly out of reach for many of us.

These soaring prices are indicative of two things: that it is the monsoon, a time when fish breed and a fishing moratorium is in place; and that even if it isn’t, a larger crisis driven by climate change and overfishing is depleting stocks of humanity’s most-preferred fish across the world.

The pomfret and kingfish are also costlier than ever because they are eaten by India’s 1% or exported, leaving most fish-eaters looking for alternatives. In recent years, guided by my mother’s cue, we’ve successfully explored alternatives beyond the top two.

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One of the best has been the mandeli or the anchovy, a finger-sized fish that my mother makes into an earthy curry. You can eat it bone and all. But it isn’t always available with our fishmonger. The two other humbler fish that we are partial to are the sardine and the mackerel, which we consume much more than we ever did.

Both are oily fish, packed with nutritious omega-3 fatty acids, beneficial for lowering blood pressure and keeping your ticker in good order. Both are storehouses of vitamin B-12, which is good, among other things, for your bones, hair, mood, memory, and energy levels. When I was younger, we were ignorant of the benefits and charms of the tarle and bangda. These were fish to which we turned up our noses.

Lately, I’ve grown to savour their dense texture and earthy flavours, and I appreciate the fact that sardine and mackerel are good alternatives for meat eaters. For instance, the Green Stars Project—a grass-roots movement that offers ethical reviews of everything from pesticides to the fish we eat—says that the carbon footprint of 1kg of beef is equal to that of 100-200kg of sardines.

They say that fish are a food source that does not require farm land, and fish stocks can be maintained with sunlight—which is essential for nurturing algae, starting point of the oceanic food chain. As long as they are not overexploited, as many fish species unfortunately are in an era of factory fishing, fish are a sustainable food source.

Sardine and mackerel are small pelagic fish, meaning they aren’t found close to shore but out at sea, usually in large shoals. Of the two, I’ve settled on the mackerel as my fishy alternative in this era of climate change and impending planetary disaster. It has fewer bones, it’s larger and easier to handle.

Even though the mackerel has been hit by warming seas in the Atlantic and moved northwards towards Iceland seeking cooler water—and has been at the centre of a multinational fisheries dispute there—the range of its cousin in the Indian Ocean appears to be expanding. It is, as its ₹350-per-kg price indicates, still plentifully available. Stocks may vary based on sea temperatures and the presence of those wasteful super trawlers, but, for now, it’s safe to say that the mackerel isn’t going off the table or becoming very much more expensive.

So it was one recent Sunday that I contemplated the mackerel before me and the fresh sourdough from our neighbourhood baker. In my mind, nothing can be simpler than a lunch of bread and fish. Usually, fish curry is excellent with freshly baked bread. Think of a soft Mumbai pao with a coconut curry. But this sourdough wasn’t very soft, it was a day old, and I didn’t have the time to make a curry.

The previous night, I had a particularly good mackerel on toast at a bar. Trying to analyse its components while drinking bourbon was a fruitless endeavour, but surely I could produce my version?

I steamed the mackerel, toasted the bread, and used whatever ingredients I could rustle up from my fridge. It wasn’t what I had at the bar: an anchovy’s taste isn’t as strong as a mackerel’s. But it’s hard to go wrong with something this elemental unless you over-steam the fish and blacken the toast.

Global warming or not, I can’t stop eating, so I might as well focus on trying to eat right. Watch this space for more experiments with sardine and mackerel.

STEAMED MACKEREL ON TOASTED SOURDOUGH
Each toast serves 1

Ingredients
1 mackerel, steamed (I use a steel steamer suspended over boiling water on the stovetop)
2 slices of bread, toasted
2 tbsp sweet-chilli sauce
1 tbsp fresh coriander
1 tbsp fresh parsley
1-2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
4 cloves of garlic
Sea salt to taste

Method

In a mortar-pestle, roughly pound coriander, parsley, garlic, sea salt and olive oil. Set aside. Spread the sweet chilli sauce on the bread (I used sourdough, but you can use any bread). Layer the steamed mackerel next. Break of pieces long enough for the toast. Use the skin, if you wish, or discard. Then spread the pounded mix of herbs, garlic, sea salt and olive oil.

Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar is the author of The Married Man’s Guide To Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures. He posts @samar11 on Twitter.

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