March of the fish

Greetings, March! The wind blew in our favorite publication for rich jerks and aspiring rich jerks from 1977, Gourmet magazine.

The well-heeled are supposed to spend part of this month on a gourmet holiday in Savannah before jetting off to enjoy some shopping in Dublin and a pub crawl in London. (That definitely sounds better than the February weekend in Moscow!)

I prefer the lower end of the classiness scale, so I'm going back to the only section of the magazine that admits that not everyone is independently wealthy, but anyone can be pretentious. That's right; we're in for more "Gastronomie sans Argent."

This month is dedicated to fish chowders:

Fish chowders served in fancy Boda Nova ceramics imported from Sweden, that is. Even if you don't have a lot to spend on the food, apparently there's plenty for the dishes.

At first I thought this was a chowder full of chunks of fish and very frugal with the black beans (because we all know beans are super-expensive!), but that's not it.

It's fish with capers and olives. The ingredients do seem pretty reasonable for a recipe in this magazine: mostly cheap stuff like onions, canned tomatoes, and potatoes. Of course, you have to make your own fish stock, but even the stock is cheap and done in less than an hour-- not an all-day project.

My favorite in this section is probably this recipe...

...just because I like to imagine the aspirationally wealthy eating fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads!

That sounds like my cat's idea of hitting it big, so the unfortunates relegated to eating fish head chowder at home instead of flitting from Ye Olde Cock Tavern to The Magpie and Stump to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese could at least comfort themselves in knowing that someone would be super-jealous of them. I'm not sure that a little black cat is the audience the pretentious but cashless gourmets had in mind, but you have to take what you can get if you don't pop out of your momma onto a mountain of gold coins.