The lightning of the title is an illumination, linked to a special reflection, the rainbows of the dorado that fights under the boat before giving up and letting itself be lifted up: it is a scenographic flash that becomes a flashback and a pun. As I like it.
The dorado has an iridescent colouration: an archaic, very old face and it is fascinating me in an indescribable way: it is still caught with the so-called shadow fishing that uses palm trees and branches, and it is one of the most famous and tasty (blue) fishes (blue) known from the dawn of Mediterranean civilisation and not only. The dorado is a real sinuous queen, and it is part of us, without you noticing it… also because its fame has been obscured by the presumed economic nobility of other species. That’s it.
When I went to Santorini, I was looking forward to going to the site of Akrotiri, where 37 centuries ago there was a Cycladic city at the forefront of the sophisticated social organisation and its urban and engineering conquests, in the off-shore fishing navigation; and so, for its technique and its culture. It was buried by the explosion that destroyed half of the island between 1627 and 1600 BC. The Aegean Pompei, However, here the inhabitants managed to leave in time: there had been many signs, strong warning shocks before the terrible event.
It was crazy: the most imponent eruption, the mother of all the volcanic eruptions ever, it caused a tsunami which reached Crete, it triggered the decline - also for a concomitant series of mega earthquakes - of the Minoan civilisation which had formed the Cyclades one, and changed the path that our history would have taken. At the archaeological museum of Fira (Thira or Thera), where there are the most beautiful finds of that amazing period, I paused myself in admiration in front of the fresco of the “young fisherman”(it was in room number 5 of the “West House of Akrotiri”) which shows its preys: two dorado bunches, a dozen in total.
It is one of the most famous images of that fantastic period of conquests, travels, exchanges, crossings on the se. And it is certainly the first representation of the dorado, or dolphinfish (from the family of Coryphaena); or capone fish, as it is also known along the Sicilian costal areas. A name, the Sicilian one, which triggers a parallel - gastronomic - path . Which I will try to draw for you later. And, by the way, it is the universal symbol of happy fishing, in my opinion.
The Hemingway's is a clamorous misunderstanding
Photographing the Cycladic fisherman, I focuse
d on the long readable caption next to him, prepared by the curators of the museum.It disappointed me. Too generic, for my old taxonomic mania: it is written that the boy holds “a rope with fishes form the mackerels family in each hand”. That is not right, I told myself. And I immediately thought that the fluctuating fate of the dorados was a bit linked to misunderstanding. The memory rushed to literature, the one of a very high upper class. And to one of the blows I had taken a while ago, when I discovered that mu mythical Fernanda Pivano, undiscussed priestess of the masterpieces of American fiction (thanks to her I devoured them, sharing the enjoyment with a couple of generations of Italians) had even mistaken the translation of a cult book by Ernest Hemingway: “The old man and the sea”.
All because of the dorados. Incredible. In English, the dorado is also called dolphinfish, and the assonance with the dolphin provoked an abyssal topic.
I make a digression. Let’s read together shreds of the great master who won the Pulitzer prize in 1953 and the Nobel prize for the literature the following great, thanks to, in fact… the dorados.
Here is the primigenaial tradition of a crucial hermingwayan passage. « […] It must be very strange in an airplane, he thought. I wonder what the sea looks like from that height? They should be able to see the fish well if they do not fly too high. I would like to fly very slowly at two hundred fathoms high and see the fish from above. In the turtle boats I was in the cross-trees of the mast-head and even at that height I saw much. The dolphin look greener from there and you can see their stripes and their purple spots and you can see all of the school as they swim. Why is it that all the fast-moving fish of the dark current have purple backs and usually purple stripes or spots? The dolphin looks green of course because he is really golden. But when he comes to feed, truly hungry, purple stripes show on his sides as on a marlin. Can it be anger, or the greater speed he makes that brings them out? […] Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. It jumped again and again in the acrobatics of its fear and he worked his way back to the stern and crouching and holding the big line with his right hand and arm, he pulled the dolphin in with his left hand, stepping on the gained line each time with his bare left foot. When the fish was at the stem, plunging and cutting from side to side in desperation, the old man leaned over the stern and lifted the burnished gold fish with its purple spots over the stem. Its jaws were working convulsively in quick bites against [72] the hook and it pounded the bottom of the skiff with its long flat body, its tail and its head until he clubbed it across the shining golden head until it shivered and was still. Tomorrow I will eat the dolphin. He called it dorado […] ».
Yeah, the translation error is even too obvious, that dolphin doesn’t exist : the last scene - it it had really been about a dolphin - it would have been horrifying. And instead, the protagonist is a simple dorado. Exactly like the plump one I saw, another picture I stole, while it was unloaded from a Caribbean fishing boat on Curacao port not far from the floating market.
This is how it went. But it doesn’t end here.
The «old» Antonio Masarone, Acciaroli and the destiny fulfilled in Ischia
His name was Santiago, the old fisherman in the Gulf Stream of Hemingway’s novel. In everyday life, however, he was none other than Uncle Antonio ‘u Viecchiu (“the old” in Neapolitan dialect), as he was greeted on Acciaroli small harbour since the 1950s. Exactly the period during which Hemingway landed in those areas, during his tour in Italy. There, in the small hamlet, he immediately settled in: he always walked barefoot, he drunk, offered drinks, asked questions and wrote, wrote. In that outpost of Cilento, at the same time the “invention” of the Mediterranean Diet happened thanks to another American who will then be acclaimed. The physiologist Ancel Keys. In this trotting of suggestions, therefore, the excellent Ernest met Antonio Masarone - also known as Santiago - and became his friend, with the liquid complicity of whisky. And was inspired from him to make his Cuban fishermen immortal.
As Emilio La Greca Romano recently wrote : “[…] And this was how Uncle Antonio the Old established a cordial relationship with the great writer. He was a man who never did anything;
He placed himself under the young palm trees on the square in front of the church, he looked at the sea towards the Licosa and he wrote with the bottle beside him and walked barefoot like all of us, he wanted to know a lot of things from me”. This is how Uncle Antonio remembered him. “He - affirmed - loved the sea and those who face it to make a living to survive”. Uncle Antonio, ‘u Viecchiu, spent whole days offshore, far from his family like Santiago and he was skinny and bony and he had accentuated wrinkles on the nape of his neck. On the cheeks, the Old man had the big spots of skin cancer, caused by the sun reflections on the tropical sea. The spots ran down the sides of his face and his hands had deep scars, but none of these were recent. They were- Emilio La Greca’s text evoking Hemingway continues - all old like erosions of a desert without fish. Everything about him was old except his eyes which had the same color as the sea and they were happy and fearless. Antonio Masarone remained like this until he died; he remained exactly like the writer describes Santiago[…] And Uncle Antonio, felt that he had the mind and the brain of this character, in it , the old fisherman from Acciaroli easily impersonated himself because it was also his”.
Now could you ever imagine that the old Uncle Antonio Masarone has anything to do with Ischia? And it is exactly like this. I don’t know when he could have possibly stopped in the green island - the episode of when he set foot in front of the bench of Redentore quay is a bit legendary like his life - but it is also too true that his niece Anna lives in Forio, daughter of Antonio’s daughter …I recently discovered this small piece of history, with the precise awareness that our world not only is … round, and difficult - as Graziano Petrucci benevolent remembers - and small, but too magnificently rich of surprises to treat it badly.
Caponi and caponata
Oh well. The dorado is an omniscient fish. A bit like Hemingway’s authorial personality, who wrote in third person. A fish that lives there, inhabits our language. I have already told you that the other name is capone fish. And from here a nice eatable short circuit is unraveled. Let’s go in order. Do you know the caponata? I think so. There are an infinity of variables, it is like the rabbit for us, every mum knows a secret ingredient.
We start from Sicily: here today the caponata is a mix of vegetables (first of all there is his majesty the aubergine) which, once fried, are wrapped by a fundamental feeling of sweet and sour which is combined with tomato sauce, olives, capers and onions, and chunks of celery. In the sumptuous cuisine of the Sicilian aristocracy, the dorado was usually prepared - look at it - in sweet and sour sauce, the same ad hoc sauce. So what? Due to the fact that fish was a little bit expensive for common people, the people who loved to imitate the rich to fill their bellies with greater satisfaction, made a virtue of necessity and replaced the dorado-capone with the affordable and abundant aubergine. From the capone fish to caponata without capone fish.
Exactly like the event of the frugal, very frugal compromise of the “escaped fish” in Procida. I stop here, otherwise, starting from the aubergines we enter the DNA of the Mare Nostrum food in an effervescence of dizzying kickers.
In the meantime I prepare myself some Ischia stye caponata: wet, round, lukewarm and roughly crumbled freselle (dried bread); Maronti tomatoes as hard as tuff rock; garlic, spicy extra virgin olive from Piano Liguori; Greek white and large olives; oregano from Epomeo and basil from my home. Do you have anything else in mind? You have the faculty. Small and black potatoes of Serrara, boiled? Some crunchy celery? Take your time. I wait for you at the table.
