The Delectable Way Of The Sea

My mother used to buy cookbooks, try out recipes that caught her fancy, fiddle around with them in one or two more tries, then write down her version in a notebook. Those notebooks are now my kitchen gospel–a lifetime of good memories and great eats, tastes adjusted to the way we like them.

Many of the recipes in my mother’s notebooks just list ingredients, the assumption being that she knew what to do, and so would I, since she had shown me, at one time or another, how to do each recipe, most of them more than once (how much attention I paid and how much I remember, though are a different matter altogether). Anyone else had no business rifling through these family secrets; they were strictly a mother-and-daughter thing.

Cookbooks these days are more than compilations of recipes. With colored pictures professionally styled (for there are professional food stylists now) they are veritable–visual–feasts. That the recipes on their pages actually yield some delicious dishes can be beside the point; the books are so beautiful you may not want to take them into the kitchen where the toyo and the bawang might spoil their glossy prettiness.

Glenda Baretto’s new cookbook–her third–is beautiful indeed, but Via Mare: A Seafood Cookbook (Arden Imprints, London, 2001; available at National Bookstore) is one you should bring into your kitchen. For then you will benefit from the accomplished Ms. Baretto’s many years of cooking and restauranting, her expert touch and her seasoned blending of flavors and cultures.

Before she goes into the fancy stuff she starts with the basics–how to clean and fillet a fish, shuck an oyster, clean and flake a crab (now I know that the triangle thing on its underside is called an apron), clean a squid (so that’s the beak hidden inside the head in the middle of all the tentacles).

The over 100 recipes cover the gamut of seafood from anchovies to turbot (a fish steamed with morel and served with a curry sauce), and in between are even more types of fish, plus crabs and prawns, oysters and clams, eel, cuttlefish and sea urchin. Because the cookbook is international, not all ingredients will be available to the Filipino cook. As Ms. Baretto suggests in her foreword, "If you encounter any difficulties talk to your local fishmonger. You’ll find he is very knowledgeable on the subject and generally very happy to share his expertise and suggest appropriate alternatives." I wonder what my suki Aling Norma will give me as substitute for the strange looking monkfish.

There are soups and salads, appetizers and entrees. Some are down-home dishes, like rellenong bangus (a.k.a. Stuffed Milkfish), others restaurant fare, like the classic Via Mare Seafood Paella. There are some pretty exotic (for us) dishes, like Sea Urchin and Cauliflower Cappuccino with Caviar, or Lobster with Goose Liver and Balsamic Reduction. European influences come in (Baked Oyster Pizzaiola is, obviously, Italian), as do Asian touches (a lot of soy sauce) and of course the Filipino culinary experience (Seafood in Sour Broth is our good old sinigang, complete with sampaloc and rice wash).

The instructions are clear and concise and generally easy to follow, but of course some recipes are easier than others. It will probably take some fiddling around on your part to get the recipes just right, as pretty as the pictures and tasting just as sumptuous, for I imagine each chef would have a trick or two up his or her sleeve, or tucked under the toque, that a book might not properly convey. But do take up the challenge and set the skillet on the fire, and explore your way through this delightful cookbook, from the sea to your palate and your heart.