Yet Another Guy Writing About Food

Alas, the vendor wouldn't let me take her photo

This time I felt like doing it myself. Down the road from our flat sits a bustling market, the sort that used to be the only option for shoppers in Mumbai, or any Indian city. Now, especially in northern suburbs where we live, Western-style grocery stores are a plausible alternative; the calls from the vegetable vendors, dusty shelves, and stray cats prowling around the fish stalls are replaced by air-conditioning, shopping carts, and automated belts leading to the cash registers.

I imagine the fish is respectable at the Star Bazaar, the closest representative of this new breed of shopping, but it’s not as convenient as walking a few minutes out our door. (Nor does the sterility of modern grocery shopping lend itself to compelling blogging. You’ve got to be a better writer than me to wring an engaging narrative out of the Star Bazaar.)

At the market, my mystification continued. Under the roof in the area designated for fish, women sat, dressed in saris, behind small blocks displaying their wares. As we strolled through, I was able to recognize the pomfret, and prawns and crabs were pretty self evident. But which fish would make a good dinner for one? The women tried to help.

“What’s this?” my wife Katy asked in Hindi, stopping in front of one vendor.

“Ye shark hai,” (it’s shark) she responded.

Okay, shark. And it did look like one, albeit a pocket-sized shark, large enough to take a nip out of your forearm (were it still living), but not mighty enough to swallow you whole.

But I wasn’t looking for a big meaty fish. A metal plate piled with six or seven smaller, silver scaled flat fish caught my eye. “What are these?”

The vendor called the Saogali, but a later visit to the internet turned up no evidence of that name. About six inches long –before the vendor chopped off the head and tail — they resembled sea bream, if a bit smaller. I asked for two, negotiated my price (40 rupees, less than a dollar) and took them home, prepared to test both my fish scouting and fish cooking skills.

Surprisingly, I passed the exam. With help (or rather direction from Katy) on how to scale and gut the fish, they were ready for the pan, and cooked quickly in a little oil with a touch of salt, pepper and garlic. A dressing of homemade mayonnaise added a little richness. Cooked whole (without the head and tail), these fish were perfect for the simple preparation.

The one lingering question is whether we got the name right. But it’s not about to be answered immediately. In the spirit of exploration, I won’t be asking for “saogali” on the next visit. I’ll be on to something new.