A lucky dip recipe
"The delicate flavour of fish and shellfish is often lost due to overspicing and overcooking"
Meera Taneja
The recipe in question is called Crunchy cod in coconut. The picture is not of the actual dish - I couldn't find one of those and since I am unlikely to make it because of my husband's dislike of coconut, and therefore can't take one of my own, I found this picture which has quite a few of the same features.
Those features are a coconut sauce and some crunchy coconut sprinkled on top. The suggested coconut in the book is toasted desiccated coconut, but that is because back in the 80s it was not not really possible to get the variety of coconut products you can now. Coconut is a modern day miracle food and deserves a post all of its own. (I don't think I have done it yet - though I keep meaning to.) So this rather posh looking dish has flaked and toasted coconut. I'm pretty sure you can get coconut flakes in your local supermarket. You can certainly buy the coconuts and also shredded coconut. How times have changed.
I don't know if this recipe is based on a particular traditional Indian dish. I fed into Google the Indian name she has given it - Machchi Lajawah Nariyal ki but did not get anything really similar. I think machchi means fish, and nariyal means coconut but I don't know what lajawah means - well it means 'priceless' in urdu but I don't think that can be it's meaning here. Suffice to say that there are a lot of Indian recipes for fish in a coconut based sauce, but the similarity ends there. Take fish and coconut and there are thousands of different things you can do with just those two ingredients.
Meera Taneja has indeed combined European and Indian here. Her recipe is unique and she should be applauded for that. It's a sort of braised fish dish. The Europeans would probably use cream. The coconut milk is Indian - well Southern Indian to me and also South-East Asian. But she quickly fried some mustard seeds before adding onion, which I believe is a Bengali thing to do. And there is chilli in the sauce. I know that the Indians do use mushrooms, but to me the addition of mushrooms to the sauce is somewhat European, and the sesame seeds toasted and sprinkled on top - more Chinese/South-East Asian I think. Then there's the shredded lemon zest as a garnish - now where does that come from? It's an interesting dish and really I would love to try it out, but as I said I probably never will. Anyway here it is:
CRUNCHY COD IN COCONUT
4 3.5cm thick cod steaks (any white fish will do)
2 medium onions
100g button mushrooms
Rind of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons oil
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon chilli powder
300ml thick coconut milk
25g desiccated coconut
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
Carefully wash the cod steaks and pat them dry with kitchen paper
Cut the onions into .5cm thick rings and separate them. Finely slice the mushrooms. Remove the white pith from the lemon rind and cut it into 2.5cm long, very thin strips
Heat the oil, add the mustard seeds and, as soon as they pop, add the onion rings and sauté to a light golden colour
Add the mushrooms and carry on sautéing for another few minutes
Add the salt and chilli powder and pour in the coconut milk. Stir well and bring to simmering point.
Gently place the cod steaks in the sauce, spoon some liquid over them, cover and cook for about 20 minutes over a very low heat.
Spread the desiccated coconut and sesame seeds on a grill pan and toast lightly to a golden brown.
Carefully lift the cooked fish on to a serving dish and spoon some of the coconut sauce over each steak. Sprinkle the lightly toasted coconut and sesame seeds on top, then a few strips of lemon rind, and serve at once.
One wonders whether most of the lemon rind should have gone into the sauce. She doesn't mention it but at the beginning of the recipe she says, "Thinly pared lemon rind adds just the right amount of colour to the end product ... the subtle flavour of the coconut milk is enhanced by the addition of lemon juice and sautéed onions." Lemon juice is not listed at all in the ingredients or mentioned in the method, so obviously somebody did not check this recipe out thoroughly. But never mind it's an opportunity to do your own thing - which she encourages.
"These recipes are meant to fire your own imagination as much as to be used as basic recipes"
And here are a couple of other pictures I found of similar dishes, but with obvious differences - just to fire your imagination more. The barramundi on the right was baked, for example, and the sauce on the left is obviously an addition at the end rather than a component of the cooking. Interestingly a lot of the fish in coconut recipes were Thai.
