“Pesce all’acqua pazza” – fish in crazy water – is a simple preparation, typical of Naples and the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts. It is fish boiled in sea water and flavored with the colors of the Mediterranean: a clove of garlic, a small chili pepper, sprigs of parsley, a few cherry tomatoes, a puff of white wine.
If you do not have clean and obviously unpolluted sea water, melt 20 grams of sea salt in a liter of water over a flame. Then move on to seasoning and cooking the fish.
The most common fish on the coast for this recipe is the golden-mouthed red porgy, so called for its golden-orange mouth.
The fish is boiled whole, filleted for arrangement on the plate, decorated with parsley leaves and cooked cherry tomatoes, seasoned with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.
Put it in cold water with the seasoning, close it with the lid, bring it to the boil. Ready.
The hard part comes later: the fish must be removed from the water, placed on a tray and filleted.
The fish I found at the market is the grouper, which is also very suitable for this cooking method and also has a mouth, albeit for a different, “important” reason.
We cooked it during the course on Italian regional cuisines.
In the photo Asmeret shows us this.
Asmeret is Eritrean. In her country she is a promoter of culinary culture. She works on TV, where she teaches cooking. For TV she makes documentaries while traveling around her country, with footage “in the kitchen” among the nine different ethnic groups and cultures of Eritreaea.
It’s a sign that the two of us have come into contact.
Asmeret is very proud – and rightly so – of her profession. Food and cooking are powerful means of knowledge and Asmeret knows she is a means through which the ethnic groups of her country can understand each other.
I too feel proud and, really without exaggeration and without rhetoric, at the Gigliocooking table sat Palestinians, Israelis, Chinese, French, Colombians, Brazilians, Norwegians, Mexicans and students of many other nationalities: all together! United by food and by the chatter that arises spontaneously around a table. Chats that are apparently light and banal, but that ultimately create deep contacts.
In front of their own crazy water fish, everyone tells their own story: some have a son who likes fishing, some are fishermen for a living, some, like Asmeret, cook the fish from the North Horn of Africa in a very similar way to this one.