The Fish Royalè
Fish in a Fish in a Fish in a Fish in a Fish in a Fish
Like many ideas for Root + Bone content, I am reasonably sure we were drunk when we thought of this idea. Why are we doing it? What the hell are we trying to achieve? Will anyone care? When can we have a beer? None of these logical questions seems to matter when one is as pissed as a chook, which is the fundamental reason why at Root +Bone HQ, we make no major editorial decisions without first consulting a pint or 3 of Guinness—easily done when our HQ is a pub.
We drew inspiration from two of our favourite subjects: birds you can eat and classic 1970’s films. When it comes to eating birds, it doesn’t get much more kick-ass than a recipe from the halls of antiquity; The Roast Royalè, Also known as: ‘the bird inside the bird inside the bird inside the bird’. And so on. My best attempt at cooking this dish is seven birds, surgically de-boned and lovingly shoved inside each other before being wrapped in the carcass of a turkey, sewn back together and slowly roasted.
Our other inspiration was the 1975 movie Jaws. There is a scene in Jaws when they think they have caught the rogue shark. Brody and Hooper (who, I might add, looks a lot like our photographer Steve Ryan) go to the pier late at night and cut open the dead shark hoping to find the victim inside the stomach of the beast to put to rest any doubt that they have caught their killer fish. They cut it open only to find dead fish, beer cans and a Louisiana licence plate, but no eaten youngster. We all know what happens next.
We wanted to cook a Roast Royalè and wondered if we could use fish instead of birds. The idea was to cook a giant fish, then cut it open as they did in Jaws to reveal many other cooked fish in its belly. More beers became more beers, as they tend to, and we figured we could do it; we’d need a large ‘mother’ fish with a big enough stomach cavity that we could fill with smaller fish…better still, it would be to find a shark to use as the mother fish. With his penchant for authenticity, Alex even made a replica licence plate from the movie and purchased a tiny set of wellington boots and a ‘Scuba Steve’ figurine for effect. Nice one, Alex.
Saturday morning, Alex picked me up at 7 am. Hitting Billingsgate Market nursing a raging hangover is sheer stupidity, but combining this with recovery from a most severe case of food poisoning after eating a bad oyster like I was, was tantamount to insanity.
Nonetheless, although we couldn’t find a shark, we succeeded in acquiring the necessary ingredients without me blowing chunks and hightailed back to the local greasy spoon, where we planned out how we were going to pull this together. Somewhere between black pudding and baked beans, we devised our plan: Cut open the big fish, stuff lots of little fish in there, shove them in the oven and see what happens. The genius was in its simplicity.
We got to work at Greenwood Studios (Steve’s house). Unfortunately, we had so much fun fucking around, racing the live crabs we purchased, taking photos and making video footage with the vast array of seafood on hand; by the time the beast went in the oven, it had turned quite stinky, and none of us was game to eat it. We also stank the house out with the smell of hot, steaming fish, so it is here we thank Steve’s gracious housemates for letting us use their house as a laboratory again.
This posed another problem: how do you get rid of 10kg of assorted cooked and uncooked fish, at various stages of decomposition, without attracting every cat on the block? Simple: We employed the bag inside the bag trick, dumped them in the bin behind the cafe at the end of the street and proceeded to the pub, where we celebrated with a pint of Guinness. Job done.
Ingredients
1 large, whole hake
5kg box small fish such as sprats or sardines
1 kg mixed ‘exotic’ fish
3 live crabs, for racing
1 parrotfish, frozen
1 Scuba Steve figurine
Miniature wellingtons
Home made replica Jaws licence plate
Method:
Preheat the oven to 200c
Cut open big fish and stuff with smaller fish
Roast for 45 minutes until housemates cant stand the smell and put an end to experiment
Dump in bin
Celebrate with copious beverages
All Images & video by Steve Ryan https://steveryanphotography.com/
