Doeser, Linda. Fish & Shellfish: Superb Ways with Seafood. Anness Publishing, London, 2003
I love fish. I've always loved fish, as far back as anyone in my family can remember. One of the happiest days of my life, right up there with my wedding day, was when a doctor told me I was to eat fish almost every day as part of a special diet. (The special diet didn't help. But it didn't hurt either, so more fish for me!) I'm fortunate enough to be married to a man without strong dietary preferences, whose love for the produce of the sea is almost as great as mine. This book, which is part of the Hermes House series that I've been so fond of, is devoted to new and interesting recipes for preparing this favorite protein of mine.
Most of the Hermes House books in my collection are about ethnic food: Indian, Irish, Vietnamese, et cetera. They're great in that they make these recipes accessible to people who didn't grow up in that culture, or at least to people who didn't grow up cooking that way. Linda Doeser takes the same style of instruction and brings it instead to a different medium: seafood, regardless of recipe origin. Instead of a section on the socio-cultural history behind a particular style of cuisine, there is a good section on equipment and on some basic techniques to use for preparing seafood. I'm not so sure that all of the equipment is really 100% necessary - it's useful, sure, but I personally don't have that much storage space for things that are only used in one way. As for the techniques, very often you can purchase the fish already prepared for what you want to do with it, at least from a supermarket. If you buy straight from the boat or catch it yourself, you'll want these techniques.
The recipes included in this book come from all sorts of places. I haven't seen a lot of books on African cooking south of the Sahara - short of Marcus Samuelsson's work, of course - but there are some recipes from various parts of the continent included in this book. There are recipes that are identifiably Western European, some that are clearly Indian in origin and so on. Not all of the recipes are identified as to their region of origin, but this doesn't bother me as much in this book because it isn't putting itself forth as an ethnic cookbook. Some of the recipes will probably seem a little basic to people who have been cooking with fish for a long time, but I would definitely recommend this book to people who are new to seafood.
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