#Recipe 3: Red Mullet, Wild Garlic & White Asparagus
A new Passover tradition
At a recent collaborative dinner exploring MSG, Jenny Lau AKA Celestial Peach, Cyan Wong and My Neighbours the Dumplings each introduced their role in the event with a short speech about their experience of the relationship between family, memory, and food. Bec Wharton, who co-founded My Neighbours the Dumplings, spoke about her mum – who was present – and how she adapted her Cantonese culinary heritage to what grows here in Britain. One way was to put wild garlic in her dumplings.
To say this resonated with me would be an understatement.
In 2019, I’d applied for an AirBnB cooking competition, with the application asking me to present a family-style dish and explain its significance. It also involved wild garlic. Yes, whilst wild garlic may have joined Salomon shoes and nervous greyhounds as symbols of peak Claptonism, many of us actually lived close to an abundant source of the stuff whilst growing up, and before moving to East London.
In the application, I wrote
My family dish represents the kind of cook I want to be, and is at its core, a story of family. Every Passover, my immediate family hosts the second night's ceremonial meal. It has been a custom for us to prepare fish as the main event. Over the past few years, I have been in charge, whilst my Mum continues to prepare a spectacle of colourful salads. In recent years, I have developed a dish for the occasion that represents all my influences as a cook. The homeliness, abundance, and hospitality of my Ashkenazi-Jewish heritage, the passion for British seasonal ingredients, and the desire to create food that is all about sharing. The day before the meal, my family went out foraging with my brother – himself a farmer and ecological activist – and brought back a large quantity of wild garlic from the banks of the river down the road from our house. I immediately thought of how I could pair it with the fish. I’ve used it as an aromatic when cooking whole fish before, but when my dad brought back a 5kg Scottish red snapper, I had to think bigger. In the end, I created a wild garlic pesto, which I marinated the fish in. Adding white wine and shallots to the roasting tray, I cooked it for about an hour, basting it in butter for the last 30 minutes.
I did not win the competition, alas, but the dish had been a thing of great beauty. Pearlescent flakes of flesh swimming in buttery emerald liquor; the melting and melding of our tradition and the British spring. Now we cook some version of fish with wild garlic every second night of passover; another example of how our British-Jewishness has moved beyond the Ashkenazi kitchen.
In May 2023, I was back in Manchester researching the state of play in the city’s Jewish food for Vittles. One morning, I was running along those same banks and the wild garlic was abundant and still wild but neat, lush, and architecturally stunning. Upright and dignified in its flowering spread upon the rolling river banks.
This was around the time I had begun thinking about The Schmaltz. I came home and wrote the following note:
A plan? A seasonal British veg box every 2 weeks, one Ashkenazi meal from that. It would be inauthentic not to do it as a locavore. Shades of brown… and green — on why it would be inauthentic for me to not make Ashkenazi food more verdant.
I don’t know if the above plan will come to fruition but I do know that, as I continue on this journey, I need to let things flow. In kabbalistic thought, shefa (שפע), meaning ‘flow’, implies divine influence, but another word ohr (אור), meaning ‘light’ is preferred by many Kabbalists today, for its numerical value equals raz ( רז), meaning mystery. I don’t believe in a monotheistic god, but I do believe in the bewildering mystery of my own existence, and I revere the tortuous journeys undertaken by ancestors that brought me to Hale Barns, south Manchester. To the River Bollin. To wild garlic.
So this recipe respects that. It cherishes the idea that the past can only ever be revisited right now. It is chosen in the present.
I do want to discover the exciting, elegant kitchens of Hungarian and Alsatian Jews, as well as the possibly less enticing kitchen of my own ancestors in Lithuania and Poland, but what I really want to know is who cooked things; individual recipes from individual people. Why? Because this is always what makes memorable food. Like them, I can’t make the weight of heritage my own without strong foundations, but also like them, I must make it my own.
Ingredients
Recipe for eight people – serve with roast or mash potatoes.
100g wild garlic
12 white asparagus spears
8 fillets red mullet, approx. 150g per person (or 16 if they are small fish)
Maldon sea salt
Black pepper
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Method
Go down to the river banks and pick your wild garlic, ideally some weeks into the season, when the ramsons have become less pungent.
Wash it and place it in a food processor with extra virgin olive oil and Maldon sea salt. Blend until smooth.
Peel the bottom half of the asparagus, cutting off the ends, and then cutting them into 3-4 cm-length pieces.
Massage the fillets in the paste, before placing each skin down in a baking tray with a thin layer covering each fillet. Season further with black pepper and Maldon sea salt. Turn the oven on at 180°c.
Boil the asparagus in salted water for 3 minutes.
Place the fish in the oven for 7 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat the remaining olive oil in a pan and saute the asparagus until browned, seasoning them with salt and pepper as they cook.
Serve in a large bowl with the asparagus pieces underneath the fish, or as individual portions with about 6 pieces of asparagus each.