Month: May 2020

I’m always interested to learn what others do to make what they think of as tuna fish salad. Not interested enough ever to ask – I mean, if I think my preferences are not so much my business, but, simply, my preferences and unaccountable to anyone, everyone else is entitled to the same magnanimity; and there’s too much risk opening the conversation by asking, because too many people think it’s an invitation to friendly debate, and I’m not interested; it’s kind of like explaining your fierce loyalty, if you have it, to the local sports franchise, and choose your own sport, it’s all of equal indifference to me… when you start talking you have to realize, with even a gram (one twenty-third part of an ounce) of self-awareness, that there is no scientifically provable reason to root for the Pats or the Sox or the Sixers or the Hornets or the Wasps or the Bees – but when the information about tuna fish comes up spontaneously, I pay attention).

I’ve come to prefer to call it dressed tuna fish. I think tuna fish is the main attraction, and whatever is added surely should be there for its own alluring and tasty properties to be savored in their own right for sure, but added to provide a mutual enhancement, kind of like a chamber music piece with the tuna primus inter pares. I mean, most people wouldn’t, under ordinary quotidian circumstances at any random time of year, cut themselves a healthy slice of fresh onion (whatever kind of the usual suspects: white, yellow, red, etc.) and dine on it as a snack. I’ve been known to, but usually it’s around this time of year when the inestimable Vidalia (the AOC kind, not those anonymous “sweet onion” varieties available almost year-round at WFM (say) appears in the produce section in abundance) appears in the produce department.

To me, onion is the first thing to think of adding. I’ll get to the few other additions in a minute. But back to the star ingredient.

As I see it, usually the darker the meat, the tastier the tuna, and so, like the Europeans, but especially the French, the Italians, the Portuguese, and the Spanish (you can admonish me if I’m leaving somebody out, but there’s a limit to what’s available to me – and serves as context – to buy with regard to sourcing of the tinned and jarred varieties), I think the best tuna to use, if you’re not starting out fresh (to utterly different objectives) are the cuts of this noble fish usually abstracted from the Bonito, which is not strictly a tuna fish, but very close, and otherwise known, especially to Americans, as the Skipjack. The designation as to species sometimes reduces, depending on what country you’re in, to a matter of legalities and labels. But though it’s the same family as tuna, as I say, it’s a different species. However, the important thing is, seeing bonito on the label is assurance you are getting a darker, i.e., a gamier and somewhat tastier, usually, bit of fish flesh.

The best packing is olive oil. And it needn’t even be EVOO, though it’s out there in the form of more luxe products, with concomitant prices to match. But olive oil, with or without salt, and the fish of course, should be all the ingredients you see listed. Before I learned about the more premium brands, and alternatively, the more abundant equivalent, though ordinary supermarket, brands over in France, I used to buy tuna that was Pastene or Goya branded, i.e., in the “international food” section of what are otherwise white bread groceries in this country. Even the biggest chains today sequester a much smaller selection of much tastier foreign (and nothing says exotic, which it isn’t and shouldn’t be, like “foreign,” or “imported” or, yeah, “international,” which is a euphemism for “them” and “other” and always has been, and I don’t care what you say). And they congratulate themselves for doing so.

And the reason I bought it was because this was the authentic – or as close to that quality as one can find in urban centers, especially outside of New York and Los Angeles, and certain ethnic neighborhoods, if they exist, in other American cities – choice of tuna to crown the only thing I would eat that genuinely joins the words salad to tuna. I mean, of course, salade Niçoise, that amazing, and amazingly simple, and straightforward concoction that is a staple of my Mediterranean summers, when I am over there. It entails what you’d expect in a salad – fresh vegetables – and is garnished with three absolute essentials, the only natural food items that have anything done to them aside from being cleaned of surface deposits, with nothing stronger than fresh water: anchovies, small black olives (there are two or three optimal varieties, any one of which can be, and is, called Niçois), not pitted, and fillets of anchovy. But the crown, as I say, is a significant mound of tinned (or canned, if you prefer not to be British, or the jarred, which are usually the premium brands) tuna. And it’s usually dark meat, and it’s usually glistening with oil and nothing else, the oil it was packed in.

But back to my main subject: dressed tuna fish.

I like to use either of two brands, both caught and packed in Portugal (Ortiz brand) or Costa Rica (Tonnino brand), and usually to be found in one of three varieties of the fish species we all, let’s face it, basically crave periodically for inner peace: yellowfin, bonito, and albacore, or name your species. And unpredictably it’s available in greater or lesser abundance in either of two cuts. There’s the one that’s called “white” or “white meat,” and usually sources from the albacore, as well as from the bonito. And from the latter, also, the meat may have a much ruddier hue naturally, and there’s the one that’s called “ventresca,” which is what Sicilians call the Italian word for the belly of the fish, the “ventre.” And this latter cut is meatier, juicier, fatter, and hence more flavorful. And it’s also costing a prettier penny.

In any event, from those two brands, and from, admittedly, a good number of others, but these are the ones I see in my local stores, but there’s, for one, Genova Seafood, an Italian brand, and eminently typical of what can be found in even the most pedestrian of super markets in rural France (let’s say). These brands are a bargain, actually, as the same fish and the same cuts are packed in the same olive oil, and tinned usually in somewhat smaller packs (doubtless to keep the prices from seeming exorbitant). And you couldn’t go wrong with this category either.

I open the tin, but, purely as a matter of purely personal subjective preference, I prefer the glass-jarred products (maybe it’s that I can see what’s “swimming” in there; maybe it’s the somewhat false perception that glass is more readily sterilizable and clean than sheet metal, usually steel – I say all this, and then I’ll admit, when I’m in Provence, I do as the Provençals do, and I buy my thon [tuna, tonno, whatever] in a can). I upend the container with the fish and the oil into a strainer bigger than the opening of the jar and let the oil drain out into a fat and oil receptacle I keep nearby to keep the oil out of the household trash.

When it’s fully drained, I empty the chunks, and they are usually large whole bits, intact, of even larger cuts of fillet, into a non-reactive bowl, usually stainless steel, and I gently break it up for a minute or so with a cooking fork, of the skinny three pronged variety. I then rinse the skin and towel dry a whole fresh lemon. I cut it into halves across the middle (that is, a latitudinal cut through the middle, rather than a longitudinal cut from stem end to south pole) and I use a juice squeezer to squeeze out of every drop of juice, and withhold every pip or seed, on top of the tuna.

I add the following (and these are approximate measures; as with so many dishes of casual, but still very vital and compelling, intimacy in my usual diet, I do it by eye and by hand… true enough, but if I told you “a scant handful,” it would mean very little, because you have no idea the size of my paw):

3-4 Tbsp of walnut halves, roughly chopped
3-4 Tbsp of your favorite fresh onion (Vidalia if you got, but this makes the result particularly mild), finely diced
1-2 Tbsp of poppy seeds (make sure they’re still fresh)
¼ – ½ tsp of celery seed

That’s it.

Now gently break up the tuna and blend with the other ingredients, until the tuna is in large shreds (at their smallest) and has blended evenly with everything else, and the tuna has absorbed the lemon juice, and so that all the ingredients mildly adhere to one another, so they would make a mound in a tablespoon without crumbling.

I like my dressed tuna in a sandwich of really good crusty bread – but it works in a ciabatta roll, or on strips of the same bread you prefer otherwise for a nice croustade or avocado toast. Really, it’s good on any decent bread you’ve got left before you can justify venturing out (literally, or virtually online) to get your hands on some more bread – unless of course, you’ve taken up baking your own. I will admit to liking mayonnaise, in incredibly moderate amounts. However, I’m not crazy for the iconic American diner version of tuna fish salad, in which the fish, and whatever else is added, which you can’t usually discern identifiably, is drowned in a sea of mayonnaise, so it’s more an unctuous tuna spread, and far removed from being “tuna salad,” never mind my more dainty designation of dressed tuna fish.

So I may (and I may not, though I usually do) put a thin layer of mayo, spread on at least one slice of the sandwich, as long as the mayo is really good and still fresh.

My thinking is, simply, in terms of culinary philosophy, the star and main attraction of this dish, if it’s to be glorified by even this clinical designation is… (the further I get in writing this, the more “dressed tuna fish” sounds not just kind of dainty and hoity-toity; it’s not honestly, this is just the way I like it)… the tuna. The other ingredients? Not just there for the ride, but as enhancements and amplifiers of the pleasure of eating this delicious fish. They are not there just to season it in a somehow organically complementary way, but to help glorify it a bit further.

I’ve made this version of this indubitable comfort food staple for at least 25 years now. I try variants, mainly by way of adding other ingredients, and sometimes by way of adding tinned (or jarred) tuna prepared in something other than olive oil. But I always come back to this basic recipe.

It’s tuna, and it’s the other ingredients working together, to their mutual esteem as a dish. And maybe to solemnize it, to the degree it really does deserve, as does all good food, however seemingly humble, to be thought of and consumed as having a sacramental quality, along with being pleasurable and nutritious and life affirming.