[lit-ideas] Stingray Salad
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:18:53 -0800
Stingray salad
- Ben Schiff
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Years ago, I used to go fishing off the Berkeley Pier. What I usually caught were
silvery fish called kingfish. These made a respectable meal, and on a good night I and a
friend might get lucky and catch six or eight. Mostly, we liked to hang out on the pier and
slowly freeze in the wind. My ambition was to catch a big striped bass. I never did, but I
saw someone else bring one in. My most profound catch was a stingray.
I'd seen people catch stingrays before. They fought the line like crazy, and they were a
bit tricky to land, because you wanted to stay away from the stinger.
I battled my stingray for quite a while; it was like being hooked into a wayward truck.
Eventually I managed, with help from others, to hook it with a gaff through the wing and
haul it up onto the pier. It was rather damaged from the gaff, and throwing it back seemed
pointless -- even if I could figure out how to pick it up safely and heave it over the side,
a bleeding ray would be attacked by sharks, or in any case, I thought, become diseased and
die.
When I landed my ray, somebody said that their wings were good to eat. This resonated
because, occasionally, when walking down the pier, I had seen grisly remnants of the center
part of a stingray whose wings had been cut off. So I killed the stingray and, believing
that fishing was to be done in order to eat (not for the joy of killing), I cut off the
ray's wings, wrapped them and took them home.
The wings were very solid flesh with a tough skin, but I figured that cooking them like
any other fish would work (there was no Internet in those days to look up "how to cook
stingray"). I skinned the wings (pliers and a sharp knife worked well together).
I salted and peppered some flour, coated the wings in beaten egg and dredged them in the
seasoned flour, and fried me up some ray.
It tasted terrible.
An overpoweringly strong flavor. Not a bad texture, but not something I wanted to eat. I
couldn't see throwing it out. I wrapped the wings in plastic and put them in the fridge.
I didn't have much money in those days, and in any case I still thought of the stingray
as food, something not to be wasted. A day later, I decided I could make stingray salad,
diluting the flavor and producing something edible.
Into a large bowl, I shredded the stingray wings. I added mayonnaise, chopped celery,
basil and oregano, more salt and pepper.
Now I had a big stingray salad! It still tasted terrible, but there certainly was a lot
of it. Yet, I couldn't imagine throwing out all that food.
I tried again. More celery, more mayonnaise, some chopped carrots, garlic, onions,
cooked rice. Bigger bowl.
Stingray salad on crackers.
Nothing helped.
As I threw the huge concoction out, stingray salad became a metaphor for me. Sometimes
you can't solve a problem by making it bigger.
I'm not sure that adding more American soldiers to Iraq is a good idea.
--------------------
Ben Schiff is a professor of international relations at Oberlin College in Ohio.
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