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Would You Pay This?

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby Suffs » Fri Oct 16, 2020 10:57 am

I think that some folk disliked 'rock' because, like skate and other rays it is from the shark family and is cartilagineous ... the cartilage begins to break down quite quickly and produces an ammonia smell which taints the fish, so it needs to be cooked fresher than bony fish like cod and plaice. Back in the day, the fish cooked in chippies away from the coast will not have been as fresh as it might have been and 'rock' (aka rock eel, rock salmon etc) got a bad reputation.

There are problems with sustainability re Ling, and it should only be bought if caught by inshore dayboats (which most of it around the west coast is), not from deep sea fishing.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby scullion » Fri Oct 16, 2020 11:20 am

maybe that was what put me off fish in the first place. my mother would always buy rock salmon (dogfish) from the market - theoretically fresh from grimsby - and the taste/smell of ammonia was, to me, horrendous. i could smell it in any fish - even straight from the trawler - along with the ordinary fish smell (yeuk).
maybe i share the genes with a cousin of my father whose father, husband and sons, were all trawlermen - she couldn't abide the smell or taste of fish either and she was given it fresher than anyone on their return from sea.
my grandmother wouldn't eat cod - scavenger of the sea, she called it, it would eat anything, good or bad.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby Suffs » Fri Oct 16, 2020 11:25 am

scullion wrote:... - theoretically fresh from grimsby - and the taste/smell of ammonia was, to me, horrendous. i could smell it in any fish - even straight from the trawler - along with the ordinary fish smell (yeuk)....


Fish 'Fresh from Grimsby' could've been caught several days before it was landed.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby scullion » Fri Oct 16, 2020 11:29 am

i know - one side of my dad's family were generations of grimsby trawler men.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby KeenCook2 » Fri Oct 16, 2020 12:23 pm

Suffs wrote:
scullion wrote:... - theoretically fresh from grimsby - and the taste/smell of ammonia was, to me, horrendous. i could smell it in any fish - even straight from the trawler - along with the ordinary fish smell (yeuk)....


Fish 'Fresh from Grimsby' could've been caught several days before it was landed.


Yes, we get the "fresh fish today, fresh from grimsby" vans coming round our London suburb quite frequently. I don't think we've ever bought anything from them - or maybe we might have years and years ago when we were young and more gullible than we are now :lol:

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby Earthmaiden » Fri Oct 16, 2020 12:38 pm

I'm assuming that rock/dogfish is what we called Huss. I've never tried it battered from a chip shop but my grandmother used to buy it for a treat from a fishmonger in Chichester and fried it dipped in lemon juice and floured. It certainly never smelt nasty and was one of my better childhood experiences of home cooked fish.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby Pepper Pig » Fri Oct 16, 2020 1:03 pm

KeenCook2 wrote:
Yes, we get the "fresh fish today, fresh from grimsby" vans coming round our London suburb quite frequently. I don't think we've ever bought anything from them - or maybe we might have years and years ago when we were young and more gullible than we are now :lol:


One of the first signs of my husband’s dementia was when I came home from a long day of school and found two huge bags of kipper fillets in the fridge - around 60 quids worth! :o

He’d bought them from the Grimsby fish chancer who was knocking on people’s doors trying to offload his surplus stock.

The really annoying thing about this was that OH was a stickler for a good whole kipper prior to this and they had to be either Craster or Isle of Man.

I think the fillets ended up in various cats.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby karadekoolaid » Fri Oct 16, 2020 2:38 pm

I'm assuming that rock/dogfish is what we called Huss.

My mum used to buy it all the time.
We never saw it, though; it was food for the cat!
It´s an extremely popular fish over here. It´s cooked and then "hashed" with onions, sweet chiles, etc., and used as a filling for empanadas (turnovers) and for arepas.If you´re in the East of Venezuela, you might get it for breakfast, along with some black beans and fried plantains.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby scullion » Fri Oct 16, 2020 4:52 pm

Earthmaiden wrote:I'm assuming that rock/dogfish is what we called Huss.

i think it's got quite a few names to disguise the fact that it's dogfish. a fish that should remain on the dissection board rather than a plate!
i'm not sure which was worse, the ammonia or the formaldehyde.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby Earthmaiden » Fri Oct 16, 2020 8:26 pm


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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby scullion » Fri Oct 16, 2020 8:44 pm

they will remain with m&s. i never asked for them ( for free) when going to a chip shop. i suppose you should admire them for trying but surely they could do better than that. they'll be charging a premium for broken biscuits next.
the chap at the end of the article, saying that they are the crispy bits of chips and not the drips of batter from putting the battered food in the hot fat, may never have been in a chip shop...
(and where i came from they were called scrumps, not scraps).

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby PatsyMFagan » Fri Oct 16, 2020 9:03 pm

scullion wrote:
Earthmaiden wrote:I'm assuming that rock/dogfish is what we called Huss.

i think it's got quite a few names to disguise the fact that it's dogfish. a fish that should remain on the dissection board rather than a plate!
i'm not sure which was worse, the ammonia or the formaldehyde.


Huss is usually my first choice for F&C. I have never experienced the taint of ammonia on that fish though, but plenty of times on Skate :( :roll:

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby jeral » Fri Oct 16, 2020 10:31 pm

Earthmaiden wrote:I'm assuming that rock/dogfish is what we called Huss. I've never tried it battered from a chip shop but my grandmother used to buy it for a treat from a fishmonger in Chichester and fried it dipped in lemon juice and floured. It certainly never smelt nasty and was one of my better childhood experiences of home cooked fish.

[my bold]
I've never heard of dipping a raw fish fillet in lemon juice first. Would you recommend it as something to try?

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby Earthmaiden » Fri Oct 16, 2020 10:35 pm

scullion wrote: the chap at the end of the article, saying that they are the crispy bits of chips and not the drips of batter from putting the battered food in the hot fat, may never have been in a chip shop...
(and where i came from they were called scrumps, not scraps).

I can't remember now if we called them scrumps, scraps or something else. When I was about 16 we used to get a generous bag of them to share for about 3d on the way home from evenings out because they were cheap. Buying in M&S isn't quite the same!

Dipping white fish in lemon isn't something I do, I usually pour or squeeze a lot over it during cooking though (and with salmon) so it probably amounts to the same.

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Re: Would You Pay This?

Postby jeral » Fri Oct 16, 2020 11:10 pm

The scraps from M&S probably still cost 3d truth be told so I wonder if they'll sell me the content minus packaging for a whopping 2 new p.

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