Fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner . . . Hugo Arnold enjoys a piscatorial feast
I've been known to eat fish all day: kippers at breakfast, or plaice. The sweet flesh is served on a Pyrex plate, straight from the oven. The melted butter becomes infused with the fish's juices, ideal for soaking up with soda bread. So much healthier than a fry. Lunch in a perfect world would be oysters - a dozen I hope, but six would suffice. Kelly's from Galway Bay for preference. And maybe some smoked salmon, wild if possible.
On a warm evening, my preference is for crab, but lobster is a good stand-in. After that it is on to the serious stuff: cod and lentils, turbot and hollandaise, skate (or ray) and burnt butter and capers. Or John Dory, roasted to within a centimetre of its ugly existence - this is not a pretty fish, although it comes up trumps with a spicy salsa.
Sea bass, if it really is from the open sea, can be a delight, but most of what is on sale now is farmed. Haddock bakes up a treat; hake is sheer heaven (try poaching it in olive oil with garlic and buckets of chopped parsley) and brill is, well, pretty brill, particularly with herb butter, or herb-laced extra virgin oil.
The problem is that most of these fish are under threat. But what is one fisherman's endangered species is another's line-caught delight, for which chefs are prepared to pay a premium. My fishmonger, Peter Caviston, points to the success of closing off parts of the Irish Sea, which many think has now given the humble cod some chance to recover. As he points to his gleaming cod, I want to believe him, but getting hard facts is not easy in this complicated area.
Fishing, as described in Charles Clover's book The End of the Line (Ebury, £14.99), is a complicated business. In the book he visits the fishing grounds and various parliaments of the world, trying to make sense of why a Spanish trawler will fish off Iceland to feed its domestic market; why the anchovies you buy in the supermarket may have been caught off the coast of Chile, and why everyone is anxious that we should get into grey or red gurnard.
Our collective greed is undoubtedly damaging the oceans, and as governments scrabble to find ways to ease the problem, less fish is being fished (trawled) by fewer bigger boats at a higher cost. At the moment, the south coast of England sports more small fishing boats than it has for a long time. Their skippers are more likely to have a mobile in their hands than a radio, and a line in preference to a net. The phone is to call the chefs in London to let them know what will be heading up to the city on the train. On the menu there will be fresh fish, caught literally a few hours earlier and handled by only a few.