The Atlantic mackerel have started swimming through local waters on their way to their cool summering grounds farther north. These are Scomber scombrus, the ones with the bold black markings on their backs. Their arrival coincides with the arrival of city visitors heading to their summering grounds on the Cape, and the opening of Mac’s Shack tonight.

One of my hopes for this season is to introduce these two different species of travelers to one another.

In years past, nearly all of our local mackerel catch went to Europe, where the Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese have always appreciated its firm, meaty richness. It’s a shame to miss out on something this good, especially when we have access to it at its peak freshness. Alex and I are determined to keep some of it here from now on.

I’ve been working up a mackerel special for the Shack: a vinha d’alhos, that I think balances its richness perfectly. Fish done this way is a Provincetown tradition, translated from a pork recipe brought over by the Portuguese islanders who joined Cape Cod fishing crews here in force over a hundred years ago. The fish is skillet-crisped, then submerged in a wine vinegar marinade, just like for an escabeche. But alho means garlic, and ours packs a good punch of it.

I’m also excited about the way white beans, escarole, and pancetta taste alongside seared sea scallops. And I think you’ll like grilled calamari with a citrus vinaigrette and good, crunchy sea salt––they’re the best simple compliments for the sweetness of our local squid.

A chef’s life sure does include a lot of unadvertised hoisting, hammering and polishing around here. I’m just breaking in my new range, Ichi is still learning the geography of his expanded sushi bar, and the paint on the walls is barely dry, but we’re ready for our opening tonight and looking forward to seeing everyone again.

We start serving dinner at 5pm. Come on in and meet your mackerel.

Mackerel Vinha d’Alhos

Serves 4 as an appetizer

4 good size mackerels (8 to 10 ounces each… or buy 8 smaller 6-to-8-ounce mackerels)
1/2 cup flour for dredging the fish
1 teaspoon paprika, also for the dredging
olive oil for frying
5 cups good wine vinegar (I use a mixture including mostly champagne vinegar)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt
a heaping 1/4 cup of sliced garlic
1 tablespoon red chili pepper flakes
1/2 sweet onion, sliced into thin half-moons
1/2 sweet red pepper, thinly sliced
1 scotch bonnet pepper (or less) minced if you like things on the hot side
spring lettuce greens or arugula plus a few scallions and chives for the garnish

Gut and rinse the fish but leave their heads on; pat them dry. Combine the flour and paprika in a shallow bowl and dredge the fish in the mixture. Quickly flash fry the mackerel––that is, fry it hot, so that it browns quickly without cooking all the way through. Remove the mackerel and set it aside in a glass or pottery dish deep enough to allow for marinating the fish.

In a saucepan, heat the marinade ingredients: the vinegars (any good vinegar will work, but I combine about one cup each of red, rice, white, and champagne vinegars, then add another cup of champagne vinegar; I like its delicate flavor), the sugar, salt, garlic, and red pepper flakes, bringing the mixture to the boil and stirring to dissolve the sugar well. Turn off the fire, drop in the sliced onion and peppers, and pour the marinade over the fish.

Refrigerate for 3 hours to allow the fish to cure and the flavors to meld. Leave it overnight if you prefer. It can go longer, but the flavors are brightest within a day or so. Plate on salad greens, spoon on plenty of the marinade, and garnish with sliced scallions and chives.

My brother came into the office last Monday morning looking like the cat who ate the canary. Not an uncommon look for an eater like Alex, I might add.

“What did you have for breakfast today?” he asks.

“Nothing. Toast.” I don’t ask what he had, but I can tell that he wants me to.

“Well, you shouldn’t have missed the staff meeting today,” Alex says. “The lady from Petrossian Paris was here. With samples.

“Fantastic stuff,” Alex goes on. “It’s amazing how much caviar tastes like oysters. Pure umami. Sea-salty brine. Richer than oysters, though. Buttery. I mean, think about it, they’re eggs, after all. They’re loaded with fat, the good stuff, Omega-3s. We picked four favorites to sell on the website. And I think we should stock some in our markets.”

There was one question that I knew might give Alex indigestion: “Did you talk about sustainability?” From what I’ve been reading, the Caspian Sea is drying up, and the sturgeon that historically produced great caviars are overfished to the point of near extinction. Tasting––let alone selling–– the stuff would not exactly be in keeping with our priorities.

According to Alex, the folks at Petrossian agree. It turns out that none of the caviar they offer is from the Caspian anymore. There are many species of sturgeon around the world, and Petrossian has been working directly with farms to develop caviars that show off the best flavors and textures of each. The rep told Alex, “It’s no longer all about beluga, ossetra, and sevruga.”

Being a caviar specialist is now about working with farmers to be sure the fish are allowed to mature before roe is harvested. That translates into firmer, more flavorful “beads.” Then Petrossian oversees the traditional process of rinsing and salt-curing the caviar without adding Borax, high fructose corn syrup, dyes, and all other nasty stuff that goes into fake products.

The Petrossian rep left Alex with a few jars, enough to set up another round of tasting, and strict instructions about how to go about it. You can’t scoop up caviar with a silver or stainless spoon––it will pick up a metallic taste. They actually bulk pack it in gold-lined tins, so I guess gold would work, but mother of pearl is traditional. Since we didn’t have either of those, we used wood.

You don’t exactly chew caviar. Instead you press it against the roof of your mouth with your tongue to feel its texture. The flavor comes bursting out of the roe. You’re supposed to close your mouth and breathe in over each bite, as if you were tasting wine.

You eat the really good stuff straight out of the jar, which you’ve wedged into crushed ice, or maybe on blini––small, buttery buckwheat pancakes. Our friend Teresa made some of those in order to get herself invited to the tasting (check out her recipe, below).

You’re supposed to save the garnishes like sour cream, chopped eggs, and minced red onion for the less expensive versions.

Champagne? Maybe. Vodka is preferable.

Here are our tasting notes on the caviars we picked. You can order them here on our website.

Kaluga Caviar: Large, green-gold beads, lightly briny flavor combined with a rich, almost sweet earthiness that lasts a long time on the palate. Alex liked this one best for its buttery flavor. Wouldn’t you know it’s the most expensive of our picks. (Huso dauricus, also called “River Beluga,” is a large sturgeon, farmed near the Amur River and the Shanghai mountains of China.)

Alverta President Caviar: Medium, darker beads. A pleasant yeasty nose and a mild nutty taste; balanced flavor that is neither as briny nor as buttery as the Kaluga. This is the one Petrossian considers its highest grade of roe from farmed American sturgeon. (Acipenser transmontanous, also called “White Sturgeon.” Native to the Sacramento River in California and farmed near its natural habitat.)

Classic Transmontanous Caviar: Medium, darker beads with a nice firm texture. Slightly briny, with a flavor that reminded us of Wellfleet oysters. In fact, it’s fantastic served on top of a Wellfleet oyster. This is the one I like best for its deliciously fresh taste––I don’t miss the earthiness of the Alverta or the butteriness of the Kaluga. Very reasonably priced. (Another Acipenser transmontanous, a sustainably farmed California sturgeon.)

Trout Roe: Big bright orange beads that go “pop” on your tongue, with an almost fruity brine. Some of us tasted a smoky flavor in this roe and all of us thought it was delicious. This is what I have in mind as an Easter canape––it’s a beautiful color, plus garnishes like sour cream and chives won’t bury its bright flavor. (Oncorhynchus mykiss, harvested wild in Armenia and imported.)

Blini

Makes 30 canape-sized pancakes

These little pancakes are the classic vehicle for caviar. The nuttiness of buckwheat flour is part of what makes them so right. That and the butter. The traditional version is yeast-raised, but these are quicker. This recipe is adapted from one by Ina Garten in Barefoot in Paris––buttermilk is the main difference.

1/3 cup buckwheat flour
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 large egg
1/4 pound butter, clarified

Put the butter in a small saucepan and let it melt slowly over low heat. You’ll see that it separates into white frothy clumps and clear golden liquid. It’s the golden liquid you want––the white part is the milk solids, which are what make butter burn so easily. To separate the golden “clarified” part, just slowly pour it into a small bowl, leaving the white solids behind in the pan.

Whisk together the flours, baking powder, and salt. Beat the egg with the buttermilk and stir lightly into the flour mixture. Add one tablespoon of the clarified butter and stir just to combine.

Heat a heavy cast iron pan or pancake griddle and coat it generously with clarified butter. Make small pancakes using just one tablespoon of batter for each. Flip them to brown lightly on both sides. Wipe out any drips and spoon more clarified butter into the pan between each batch––you want the pancakes to be golden and buttery. These can be made ahead and refrigerated or frozen, just thaw them and reheat in a well-buttered pan.

Sometimes I don’t feel like cooking. Like the day after our eight-course Groundhog Day celebration of local food over at Preservation Hall (a few photos are over here on FB). But I’m not one to let that stop me from eating. So I took home a pint of Maine shrimp from our Eastham store. Give them about a minute with butter, garlic, and white wine and you have one fine dinner-in-a-skillet.

The inspiration here is straight out of Boston’s North End, where, for me, eating Italian used to mean ordering “Shrimp Scampi.” Later I was taught that scampi was the what Italians called their langoustines, and that in Italy those shrimp were typically pan-sauteed this way. So the Italian-Americans who opened restaurants here coined “Shrimp Scampi” as a way of saying shrimp cooked scampi-style. Now I hear that putting it on your menu is so unfashionable that it’s actually hip.

All I can say is it’s the right thing to do with Maine shrimp.

Maine shrimp, also called “northern shrimp” (Pandalus borealis), are a winter treat in New England, nothing like the bigger warm water shrimp we import. They seem delicate because they’re so small, but they’re surprisingly firm, sweet and flavorful. The season is going to be short this year, according to Talking Fish and other sustainability reports we follow, because after years of good harvests, landings were down last year. The idea is to support the population by limiting the number of days of fishing this time around.

The simplicity of a “scampi” sauce treats these shrimp with the respect they deserve. And then there are the pan juices: you will want crusty bread or a plate of pasta to sop up every last drop of them.

Maine Shrimp, Scampi-Style

If you’re serving this on pasta, you can have all the prep work done in the time it takes a pot of water to come to the boil. I even give the pasta a head start, because the scampi will come together in just a few minutes. One small step that’s worth a lot of flavor: drain the pasta when it’s al dente, then add it to the sauce in the skillet to simmer for a minute or two before you serve it.

serves 4

1 pint peeled Maine shrimp
1 small shallot, minced
4 fat cloves garlic, minced or sliced
1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, minced
a big pinch of dried red pepper flakes
1/3 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
1 cup dry white wine
3 tablespoons butter
a big handful of Italian parsley (about 1/4 cup minced)
1 tablespoon breadcrumbs
4 wedges of fresh lemon
1 pound linguine or a loaf of crusty country bread

Drain the shrimp over a small bowl and reserve any juices to add to the pan sauce later.

Warm the olive oil in a large skillet and sauté the shallot, garlic, thyme, and the pinch of red pepper flakes. Watch and stir the mixture for just a minute or so, until the garlic begins to soften and get aromatic––don’t let it brown.

Sprinkle the salt on the shrimp and toss it into the pan. Sauté the shrimp, turning it in the garlic and herbs for a minute or two, until it’s just opaque. Then remove the shrimp to a bowl and set it aside, but keep your skillet going.

Pour the white wine into the skillet. Add any shrimp juices that might have accumulated when you drained it. Simmer to reduce the liquid in the pan by about half.

Add the butter and whisk it into the pan juices to create a sauce. Whisk in the minced parsley and the breadcrumbs. Then either add the pasta to the sauce, let it a simmer for a minute, and toss in the shrimp, or skip the pasta and just stir the shrimp into the sauce and serve it with bread.

A last-minute squeeze of fresh lemon juice adds a nice bright note to the dish.

All of us off-season cooks at Mac’s are busy working up a tasting menu for a benefit we’re hosting on one of my favorite holidays: Groundhog Day. We’re still working out the details of each course, but I can tell you this, one of them will involve pickles. Not the usual cucumber pickles you buy in the store, but something homemade with more unusual ingredients.

My wife Traci points out that Groundhog Day is not a holiday. But part of our purpose for this party is to honor WCAI (the Cape and Islands’ NPR station) for its reporting on the local food movement, and I liked the challenge of creating a winter menu focused on locally sourced food. Now through early spring, the Cape’s abundance is not so obvious. The good eating is here, though: have you tasted a Chatham bay scallop lately? Or an Eastham turnip?

Traci also reminds me that the last time I put pickles on the menu, things didn’t go so well. It was when we first opened Mac’s Shack. I couldn’t wait to serve my kimchi cod. I poached the fish in the brine from a huge garlic-laden container of Korea’s favorite pickle and garnished it with a healthy swirl of that funky chili-stained cabbage. I still cannot imagine a more perfect marriage of flavors. Nobody ordered it.

I’m into more fundamental pickles this winter. After a fall spent browsing Modernist Cuisine, Nathan Myhrvold’s encyclopedia of molecular gastronomy, I’ve decided there are plenty of fascinating transformations to learn about in ordinary cooking. I know my kitchen laboratory is nothing like Ferran Adrià’s, but I’ve got a sourdough starter bubbling on one counter, and it wants to be fed. On the other counter stands a brand new fermenting crock that has me studying up on how the sugars in a cucumber are converted into lactic acid during the pickling process.

The pickles I’m thinking of for our First Annual Groundhog Day Winter in Wellfleet Feast are the kind known as “fresh pack” or “quick” pickles, so they’ll develop in the fridge, not the fermenter. I’m experimenting right now with beets, parsnips, turnips, Brussels sprouts, scallions, onions, cranberries and broccoli-flower in a very basic brine: three parts vinegar to two parts sugar to one part salt.

I’ve added some dried chili peppers, and I’m tasting every day to see how these develop.
Maybe over the course of the winter I’ll soup these up with other spices. Right now, I’m just into the pure briny deep.

Basic Quick Pickled Winter Vegetables

2 quarts winter vegetables, cut into bite-size pieces (be sure to include onions in the mix)
3 cups red wine vinegar
3 cups water
2 cups sugar
1 cup salt
6 dried chili peppers or two teaspoons hot red pepper flakes
(optional: 2 tablespoons of traditional pickling spices, such as yellow mustard seed, coriander seed, fennel seed, black peppercorns, cinnamon or cloves, or a combination.)

Clean and cut the vegetables into bite-size pieces. I like to make a variety of different shapes, all about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick: longer, squared off batons of peeled parsnips and carrots; wedges of turnip and beet, also peeled; white to pale green lengths of scallion, with the roots sliced off; broccoli in florets; and Brussels sprouts? Just trim off any beat-up outer leaves, and halve them if they’re large.

Pack the vegetables into clean two quart mason jars. I like to pack each vegetable separately, though I always put a little onion into each jar. But a mix is fine, except for beets: keep them on their own or they’ll turn everything pink.

Combine everything else in a large pot––this is your brine: the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, and any spices. Simmer the brine, stirring a couple of times, and once the sugar and salt are thoroughly dissolved, kick it on up to the boil for a minute. Then take it off the fire.

Carefully ladle the hot brine over the vegetables. Fill the jars to just 1/2 inch below the top. Cover and let the jars cool, then store them in the fridge.

A note about food safety: Even though these unfermented “quick” pickles are too acidic to allow for the growth of botulism, and the hot brine and canning jar lids will create a seal that should keep unwanted yeasts at bay, the USDA doesn’t consider non-processed pickles to be shelf-stable. So there’s really no reason you have to use mason jars for these. You can just pour the hot brine over a ceramic bowlful of vegetables and let them marinate in the refrigerator. The jars just say “pickles” to me. I keep the ones I make for my family for up to a couple of months in the fridge––never longer because they’re always eaten up by then.

A few years ago, some chef friends and I started a tradition of cooking for each other on New Year’s Day. It was supposed to be all about kicking back after the weeks of long hours that go into pulling off special holiday menus for guests and family. What we needed was a pot luck. And maybe a beer or two.

But of course we all ended up trying to show off. The trick at this kind of gathering is to do something spectacular but make it seem totally offhand. I’m still thinking about the pickled green beans Eric Jansen put on the table last year. (If you’re a serious eater I’m sure you know Eric’s cooking well; if you don’t, get yourself to Blackfish in Truro as soon as they open up again this spring.) I’ve still got today to keep last year’s New Year’s resolution to get that recipe from him.

I’m thinking about trying to get a rise out of people with something equally old-fashioned: shrimp cocktail. It’s a classic crowd pleaser, and with this group, that’s code for boring. But if I do it right, I know they’ll end up eating every last shrimp.

My brother Alex would say it’s because we’ve got our hands on a superior species of shrimp, the Mexican brown (Farfantepenaeus californiensis) found wild on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

In the case of shrimp, wild is definitely better than farmed. Intensive farming, done mostly in India, Thailand, and Ecuador, is threatening the mangroves that protect whole coastal communities. And it’s rare to find farmed shrimp that is not treated with antibiotics and other chemicals. Yet I’ve read that well over 80% of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. is farmed.

Alex discovered these Pacific shrimp several years ago when he went with friends for a mid-winter week at the beach. He is not the kind to be deterred by a few tequila sunrises. As far as I can tell, he spent most of his time on those trips sussing out tacos and stuffed peppers and shrimp.

Local shrimping families used to set up their coolers on the port and sell out daily, but Alex says that now they’ve joined together in a co-op and share a nice market facility. They’ve also beat the big industrial trawlers at meeting conservation regulations by using gear that doesn’t ensnare turtles.

The Mexican brown shrimp are undeniably excellent. But the way we handle and cook them also makes a huge difference in texture and flavor. The shrimp arrive in a block of ice––a rare exception to our focus on fresh seafood that has never been frozen, but there’s really no other way to get it here in excellent condition. We thaw them gently, then, even though they’re already deveined, we extend that cut along the back so they butterfly nicely when cooked.

Then we boil them in well-salted water (about two tablespoons of salt per quart of water will approximate the salinity of seawater) for not much more than a minute. You can blame all that rubbery shrimp cocktail out there on overcooking. As soon as we drain the shrimp, we plunge them into ice water. But here’s the real secret: this water is also salted. The shrimp retain their true seafood flavor because their natural salt content is not ever replaced by fresh water.

Now to the cocktail sauce. I’m not going to cheat and make something exotic. I’m going to start with plain old ketchup and tabasco like everybody else. I actually like that familiar tart-sweet-hot combination with shrimp. But I’m not going to rummage around my fridge for the horseradish I opened in June. I’m going to go all out on a brand new jar, so it’ll be bright and pungent. A squeeze of fresh lemon juice, and I’ll have Eric asking for my recipe.

Lobster bisque is a classic, elegant, French soup (probably originally from the Bay of Biscay, known for its crustaceans). Like so many restaurant dishes that seem fancy, bisque is actually a clever use of leftovers––in this case lobster shells.

Don’t stop here just because you don’t happen to have a bunch of lobster carcasses lying around. Ask your fishmonger––that would be us, I hope––for some lobster bodies. We nearly always have plenty at our markets, left over from a morning of prepping lunchtime lobster rolls and packaging up the chilled lobster tails we sell online.

Right here on this recipe, I see a note to myself: “the better the stock, the better the bisque.” I guess I wrote that before Bella and Lili came along and changed our afternoons forever.

What I’ve learned since then is that there’s no sense denying your guests lobster bisque just because you’ve fallen behind in your stock making. The truth is, chicken stock or vegetable broth work for this soup. And so does Kitchen Basics seafood stock.

Elegance does take some effort, though, even if you’ve cheated by using stock from a box. You need an emulsion blender for this recipe, and the guts to stick it into a pot full of shells. At the restaurant, we have an emulsion blender that will take your ankle off, but I use an ordinary one at home and I promise it survives the ordeal.

You want your bisque to have a creamy texture, and I know some cooks who get there by adding a butter-and-flour roux to thicken it. At the restaurant, we blend in rice: that’s the traditional thickener for bisques. But I don’t like my soups too thick. The cream will thicken as it boils, and that plus the ground up lobster (strained through a sturdy fine mesh sieve or a chinoise) is all I use to perfect the texture when I make lobster bisque at home.

Lobster Bisque

Serves 8 as a first course

2 whole lobsters (you’ll add the meat to add to the soup at the end and use the bodies and shells to flavor the base)
2 cups diced celery, leaves included
2 cups diced carrots
2 cups diced white onion
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups dry white wine
1 1/2 cups dry sherry (set aside the half cup for finishing the soup)
2 quarts lobster stock (fish, chicken, or vegetable stock works, and so does a good packaged seafood stock like the one from Kitchen Basics)
3 bay leaves
3 sprigs of thyme
1 cup tomato paste
2 quarts heavy cream
sea salt and white pepper
(2 cups diced white mushrooms are an optional last-minute addition that I really like)

Steam the lobsters very briefly: bring about two inches of water to a rolling boil in a big pot; plunge the lobsters in head first; put the cover on the pot and blanch the lobsters for just one minute; remove them and drop them into a big bowl of ice water; drain, then remove the claw and tail meat and set it aside for finishing the soup. The bodies and shells will go in sooner.

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy soup pot. Add the diced celery, carrot and onion (you can call this the mirepoix if making bisque makes you feel French), and gently cook the vegetables until the onions turn clear. Drop in the lobster bodies and shells.

Add the white wine to the pot and bring it to a fast simmer to reduce it by one half. Add one cup of the sherry to the pot and again reduce the mixture by one half. Now add the lobster stock, bay leaves, thyme (no need to take it off the stems), and tomato paste. Simmer for a half hour, this time reducing the mixture by about one third.

Add the cream and the remaining 1/2 cup of sherry to the soup and simmer it gently for another half hour. The cream will thicken as it boils, and the lobster shells will soften up a bit.

I know it looks impossible, but now’s the time to take your immersion blender to this whole reduction. A home blender will not make a paste of the shells the way a restaurant blender will, but take your time and really bust the shells up well––you want to get all the flavor you can into the mixture.

Working over a clean pot or bowl, pass the bisque through a fine mesh sieve or a chinoise. Press on the shells and push all their flavorful juices through. Season the bisque with sea salt and white pepper.

(Now’s where I sometimes scoop out a cup or two of the soup and put it in the fridge or freezer. It’s just so good stirred with chopped tomatoes, mushrooms, peas, and more lobster, and served over pasta.)

Once the soup is seasoned, add bite-size chunks of the rare lobster meat you set aside earlier. Add the diced mushrooms, too, if you like the combination of lobster and mushrooms the way I do.

Warm the soup for a few minutes to heat it through before serving.

They’re bright and dramatic. Rich and sweet. Great with bubbly. But just in case you need another reason to serve lobster during this season of so much feasting: the end of the year marks the end of the season for our local near-shore lobstermen. It’s time to eat up.

Our winter break from backshore lobsters isn’t actually about the local lobster population, though it may be a good thing for them. Lobstering is tough in an icy nor’easter, so there’s that. But the downtime is designed to protect the northern right whales that swim along the Massachusetts coast in the winter months. That’s when females have their calves in warmer waters south of here. Then, come spring, the rights come through again, eating their way north to their summer feeding grounds.

It wasn’t lobstering but whaling that nearly ended the existence of right whales. Slow-swimming, buoyant, and friendly, these magnificent mammals were the “right” ones to hunt for oil in centuries past. They’ve been protected since the 1930s, but scientists think there may be only about 300 to 400 right whales left. Total.

That’s why it’s so important that our lobstermen do their part to protect them.

The waters directly around us are what the Division of Marine Fisheries calls “a critical habitat” for right whales. Our state’s lobstermen were the first to go to sinking groundlines––a new kind of line that connects lobster pots along the ocean floor. Older-style ropes floated up between the pots, entangling whales. They’ve modified their gear in other ways, too, with weak links that allow ropes to break away easily. During the deep winter, ships are re-routed and asked to travel more slowly to avoid the whales; ship strikes are a major problem.

We can keep you in lobsters from deeper waters through the winter, but it’s not until May, when the whales have moved on, that our local independent fishermen who work from smaller boats in near-shore waters can set their gear again.

Lobster is great for summertime feeds. But I’m for lobster now in honor of our seasonal local lobstermen, and our whales.

Warm Lobster Salad with Orange Vinaigrette

Our end-of-season lobster rush coincides with the arrival of citrus fruits. Lobster, orange, and celery are a classic combination, and the sauteed celery forms a nice warm base for the lobster, so I like this salad even though I’m not a big celery fan. Sometimes I make it with arugula or other salad greens. Just dress them and put the warm lobster on top. Either way, this salad is extra easy to put together if you buy the lobsters already steamed––those of you who are nearby: we can do that for you at Mac’s. If you’re ordering from away, we’ll send instructions on how to steam them.

Serves 4

4 steamed lobsters (one per person if they’re one and a half pounders, fewer if they’re larger)
4 navel oranges
1 bunch celery
1/3 cup fruity olive oil, plus a couple of tablespoons for sauteeing
2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar, tarragon vinegar, or fresh lemon juice
a few sprigs of fresh mint, for about 1/4 cup of minced leaves
a big pinch of salt

Pick the lobster meat from the shells, slice the tails into thick rounds, and set the meat aside while you prepare the rest of the salad. If the lobster is still warm while you’re picking it, great. If it’s cold, plan to reheat it gently in a skillet with a bit of butter just before you assemble the salad.

I like to drop the shells and bodies into a big pot to make lobster broth––it’s great in soups and risottos––later on.

Slice the peels and white pith from the oranges, then cut them into rounds. Lay a few rounds on each plate. Squeeze the ends of the oranges over a bowl, they’ll give you the juice you want for the dressing. Whisk the vinegar or lemon juice and the salt into the orange juice; stir in the mint, and set the dressing aside.

Slice the celery into pieces about 1/4-inch thick. You want about one cup per person. I like to use the ribs that include the delicate inner leaves and throw a few of the tougher outer ribs into my stockpot with the lobster bodies. Saute the celery in two tablespoons of olive oil until it’s crisp-tender.

Warm the lobster in a skillet with a little butter, if need be. Dress the lobster lightly with the orange-mint vinaigrette.

Put the warm celery on the plates next to the sliced oranges. Pile the lobster salad on top the celery, then drizzle a little extra dressing on top before serving.

Some folks from Oklahoma came into our Truro market last week and said they thought our local salmon sure looked good. I hated to be the one to have to break it to them, but New England hasn’t had a salmon fishery for more than half a century. And Cape Cod never has.

I did recently come across a New York Times report about some “remarkably handsome” salmon landed by mackerel fishermen out of Truro. Finding salmon this far from the Connecticut and Penobscot rivers was “a subject worthy of study,” it said. The article was dated May 20, 1882.

Our salmon is good. But it’s not local.

For all my talk about sourcing locally, I guess I have some explaining to do.

The wild salmon we sell is from Alaska. There are many Pacific species in the Oncorhynchus genus; you’ve probably heard of the ones we get in the summer and fall: first Chinook, then later Coho and Sockeye.

There is only one Atlantic salmon species, Salmo salar. An almost mythical fish, salmon hatch in fresh water, then swim to sea as adults. Native to New England’s rivers, adult salmon migrate as far as Greenland, feeding and growing for a year or more before returning to precisely the same tributaries they came from to breed. Scientists think they use their sense of smell to do that.

There are still wild Atlantic salmon for scientists to study. But not for us to eat. The industrial revolution with its mills along riverways critically damaged salmon breeding grounds. After that, overfishing happened quickly. Restoration projects have done some good, but commercial fishing of wild Atlantic salmon is strictly prohibited.

Atlantic salmon is farmed in many different places, from Scotland to Nova Scotia and even in the Pacific waters of western Canada. Ours is coming mostly from the Bay of Fundy right now.

Figuring out which farmed salmon to offer is a never-ending process for us. We’re in the thick of it again right now. Here’s how it works. (I promise I’ll write more about wild salmon later on.)

We start by tasting samples. That’s not always as much fun as it might seem. There’s plenty of bland, flabby farmed salmon out there. We want it to be rich, with a clean, distinctly salmony flavor. Once we find something we like, Alex starts looking into everything there is to worry about with farmed salmon, like feed-to-fish ratios and pen density.

Fancypants river fishermen may have you thinking that salmon eat flies. But adult salmon are marathon-swimming animals, and big eaters. In the wild, they eat squid, herring and other small fish, and shrimp (that’s where their orange color comes from). Nature has a way of balancing out competition and scarcity. But getting all that protein to farmed salmon is an issue. Alex’s first rule: “If it takes three or four pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon, we won’t buy it.” Any fisherman around here will tell you it would not be a good thing for all the world’s menhaden to disappear into fishmeal. Small fish are key to our fisheries.

“Salmon are piscivores,” says Alex. He’s okay with salmon whose diets include some grains and legumes like soy, along with fishmeal made from waste like skin and guts instead of whole wild menhaden. “But you don’t want them eating feed that’s got chicken or beef by-products in it––that’s just weird.”

When people hear that farmed salmon are not naturally orange, they think that’s weird, too. It doesn’t really bother Alex to know the fish gets its color by being fed carotenoids, since that’s close to what happens in nature. We’re interested in certified organic salmon, since that would mean the soy in their feed was not genetically modified. But so far it’s been hard to find a consistent supply at a reasonable price.

We think it’s most important to avoid fish that are given growth hormones and antibiotics. It’s obvious why we wouldn’t want to consume those kinds of things. And what’s more, fish kept healthy by not being over-crowded shouldn’t need them.

Alex reads up on all of this and then talks to the farmers. Making the direct connection, he says, gets farmers to talk about details that are never going to be described in marketing materials. When he’s prepared with the right questions, he can get straight answers.

There are times we’re disappointed––when salmon we think is delicious just doesn’t measure up environmentally. Or it’s too expensive. Or we’ve settled on a clear favorite, only to learn that our orders are too small to work. That’s when we might have to buy from a distributor who has more buying power than we do.

But there are times we’re reminded why we’ve not gone exclusively to wild Pacific salmon. When you meet people who are doing things right, working to farm sustainably, you want to support that. And when the salmon is good, you realize how this fish came to be so prized. It is intensely flavored, delicious like no other fish. Its fat content makes it feel good on your tongue. Alex likes it raw, but those fats (oh, and they are the “good” fats, too) make it cook up beautifully, and I really enjoy that. Either way, you wonder if you can go without it for eight months of the year.

Curing salmon is a nice way to get somewhere between raw and cooked. And the gravlax-style cure we use in our markets is easy to do. We started experimenting with gravlax when I brought a recipe back from the Manhattan Ocean Club almost 15 years ago. Now we’re reviving our favorite flavor combination––dill, mint, peppercorns, and gin––for the holidays ahead.

You need to let the fish cure for a day or two, but you don’t really have to dedicate more than about ten minutes of your time to the project. Salt and sugar are natural preservatives that change the texture of the salmon, drawing out water and firming it up, but more gently than cooking does. Mint and dill give it a fresh, herby aroma. You end up with richness and flavor that go a long way––satisfying even if you eat just a sliver. We do believe in conservation, after all.

Home Cured Salmon with Mint & Dill

Serves at least 12, enough for 20 or more as part of a big spread

One 3 to 4 pound salmon fillet
1 cup kosher salt (we like the texture of Diamond Crystal brand best)
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons gin
1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
1 big bunch of dill, minced (to come to about two cups)
1 bunch of mint, minced (about one cup minced leaves)

Feel along the center of the fillet for the pin bones––they tend to stay in the fish after it’s been filleted. If you find a row of them, pull them out with a sturdy pair of tweezers or small pliers.

Put the fillet, skin side down, on a piece of plastic wrap and set it in a glass or ceramic baking dish. Drizzle on the gin. (If you don’t have a dish big enough to hold the whole fillet, you can cut it in half, dress and wrap the two halves, and stack them for curing.)

In a bowl, combine the salt, sugar and herbs, then heap it all on the flesh side of the fish. Sprinkle on the peppercorns and pat them into the cure. It should cover the fish evenly.

Fold the plastic wrap over the top and let the fish cure in the refrigerator for just under two days (36 to 40 hours is just right. When we let it go for 48 hours it gets a little firmer and saltier than we like). Here’s mine, two wrapped halves, ready to go in the fridge:

Remove the salmon from the cure, gently scraping off any bits of undissolved sugar-salt-herb mixture, and pat the fillet dry. Slice the fillet right down to the skin, but not through it, angling the knife a little so that, slice by slice, you end up skinning the fillet, leaving the skin on your board or platter. Serve thin slices on buttered rounds of good baguette or rye bread. A dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of minced red onion or chives is nice, too.

No need to eat this all at once. The gravlax can be kept in the fridge for several days once you’ve removed the cure.

There are fish to be missed at this time of year. The blues, for instance. All of them from mackerel and bluefish to the big bluefin tuna are packing up now to leave our shores until next year. But those of us who live to eat here on the Outer Cape know how to move on quickly. Right now we’re busy with bushels of bay scallops. This is one of seafood’s sweetest seasons.

At my house, bay scallops rarely make it to the table. Instead they are stolen, one at a time, straight out of the hot baking dish by my cool-hand daughters. Bella likes them better than Halloween candy.

She ought to, considering their price, which after a higher start settled down to about $25 a pound this week. At Mac’s, Ron Brunelle is the guy to ask about why they’re so expensive. I found him yesterday at our Truro market, where he spent a good part of the day shucking bay scallops––a skill he learned growing up in Eastham. His dad, Ray, was a groundfisherman who expected Ron to shuck and do other fishing-related chores after school every day.

Ray’s lessons took. We met Ron a few years ago when he came to sell us his own bay scallops. He’s still got his skiff, but right now he’s too busy tracking down seafood for us to go out fishing. He manages our wholesale operation.

I can see that Ron hasn’t lost his touch with the bay scallops: he opens and cleans a couple of pounds while we talk. That’s one reason for their price tag right there: bay scallops are small. A whole bushel of the good-sized ones he’s shucking will yield just over six pounds of dry scallops for sale.

You want them “dry,” by the way, and not bright white. That means they’ve not been dunked in a slurry of STP, the bleaching agent and preservative, sodium tripolyphosphate, which is used by people bent on ruining one of nature’s perfect foods. The “tri-poly” plumps up the scallops––good for profits, bad for cooks. I was taught that a perfect bay scallop should be ivory colored. “Sure, but look at this one,” says Ron, holding up a scallop that’s tinged almost yellow. “It’s natural for them to be varied like this.”

They’re labor-intensive in other ways, too. Bay scallopers go out––usually two at a time––at high tide, for brief trips, always ending by 4:30pm, when they’re required to be back on shore. They lower a 28-inch drag that looks something like a clam rake with a mesh bag attached into shallow water, then haul the scallops up from the sandy bottom to be sorted on board.

“Bay scallops are a lot smarter than oysters,” Ron says. He’s laughing, but this part is true: “They see you coming, they squirt, and they get away from you.” Unlike oysters, scallops are free-swimming. Tiny blue “eyes” that rim their shells allow them to sense a predator’s approach.

When the haul comes up, some of its weight turns out to be nothing more than eel grass and small rocks. The fishermen go over the scallops one by one, checking to be sure they’re well into their second year of growth. Anything younger than that has to be returned to the water.

The bay scallop season doesn’t actually end here until spring, but most fishermen stop going after them come January because each trip yields fewer mature scallops.

They’re in the same family, but bay scallops (argopecten irradians) are not baby sea scallops (those are placopecten magellanicus). The bay scallop is a short-lived species, with a lifespan of only three years, so the point is actually to harvest only the oldest ones that don’t have another reproductive season ahead of them. The scallops aren’t tested for size the way oysters are. Ron points out the shading that gives away a bay scallop’s age, bands of color that remind me of tree rings.

Ron tries to find some seed to show me what it looks like, but he can’t find any in the bushel he’s working on. That’s a good thing, since seed is not supposed to be taken either. Some New England communities are introducing seed to try to increase bay scallop populations. And last spring we tasted some nice little farm-raised scallops, but we decided the production process wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Then there’s China. They’re doing a booming business in bay scallops, and Ron tells me the seed that started their production came from around here.

“But when you eat bay scallops like these, which we got today from Stage Harbor in Chatham, you’re eating something rare,” Ron says. “There are very few places in the world where bay scallop are growing from a natural set.”

Wild things, you make my heart sing.

Buttery Broiled Bay Scallops

These would be so good alongside some buttery homemade pasta and a few greens. But like I said, in my family these never make it to the table. The four of us eat about one pint as an appetizer, dipping a little crusty bread into the buttery pan juices once we’ve polished off the scallops.

1 pint (about one pound) fresh, untreated (“dry”) local bay scallops
1/4 cup white wine
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons bread crumbs (don’t use panko, it’s too coarse for these small, delicate scallops)
a pinch of salt

Take the scallops out of the fridge to come to room temperature while you heat the broiler. That will help them brown more evenly.

Spread the scallops in a shallow, broiler-proof baking dish. Pour the wine into the bottom of the dish. Break the butter into bits and dot it over the scallops, then sprinkle on the breadcrumbs and the pinch of salt.

Put the pan under the broiler, and keep a close eye on them: broilers seem to vary a lot in their intensity. Bay scallops, after all, do not really need cooking; here the point is to get the butter to melt and the breadcrumbs to turn golden brown. Move the pan around under the heat if need be so the topping browns evenly.

This picture of our friend Andrew Cummings, a Wellfleet shellfisherman who supplies a good many of our oysters, got me thinking about how we really ought to take on the seafood fraud problem in this country: Forget about whether your fillet has had a DNA test. What’s the chemistry between the people who harvest your fish and those who sell it to you?

At least for those of us who catch, prepare, and eat seafood in New England, it ought to be really good. As Alex pointed out to the folks at Talking Fish earlier this week, we have the advantage of being near the source. Our mission is to do right by that.

Even so, after the recent news about fraud in the fishing business, I’ve heard from customers whose sense of trust is shaken. They’ve heard us say, “Know where your fish comes from,” but now they’re wondering what that really means.

It means, for one thing, that we actually do know where our fish comes from. Pretty much down to the fisherman.

Take Andrew. We can––and do––actually watch him at work on the estuaries not far from the sandy beach at Mac’s on the Pier in Wellfleet.

We’ve listened to Andrew plenty too, as he’s gone through years of deepening his knowledge of healthy oyster cultivation. He’s told us when they’re spawning and when they’re fat. He’s shown us how he separates the growing clumps of shells to make each bivalve grow sturdier. He has, on occasion, pointed to holes made by oyster drills that can suck away an oysterman’s livelihood.

We’ve eaten a few oysters with Andrew. When he shucks, he always turns the oyster over in its shell just before he hands it to you, a move I tend to forget when I’m at the raw bar. But he’s right: the flipside stands high and round in the shell––it’s the oyster’s best.

Andrew can talk about “terroir,” though I’m not sure he can really taste the difference between the oysters he grows on the flats near us and the ones he grows in deep water a mile over, near Egg Island.

The man works hard. He knows his stuff. He knows how to eat. We have something with Andrew that business school books might call “shared values.” We call it trust. And it’s not the blind kind.

There have been a lot of calls for more regulation of seafood since the Boston Globe published its disheartening findings of widespread fraud in the business. But let’s face it, no amount of regulation will ensure the real traceability and quality that comes with this kind of relationship, built as it is on knowledge and appreciation of the product and its provenance.

The Globe printed our letter to the editor, which explained the importance of being able to look our fishermen in the eye. But they didn’t really buy it. The next day, they called for “the clout and resources of the FDA and the National Marine Fisheries Service” to prevent fraud.

Don’t get me wrong. There are regulations we believe in and follow because we think they’re important. We support fishing quotas because we know things are different from what they were a generation ago. And we think they are already proving important to restoring stocks. We’re HACCP certified, which means we use the FDAs strict food safety system for monitoring all the fish we handle.

But there’s something missing in all the clamoring for new rules. Liars and cheats are bad. But they are mere bottom-feeders in a seafood industry whose supply chain has grown way too long. The goal has got to be for all of us to get closer to the source.

We source from many others besides Andrew. And I’m determined to tell you about more our fishermen and women over the coming months. Meantime, there are a couple of things I wish everyone knew about where our fish comes from:

We do not ever buy fish from huge corporations. Instead, we buy from fishing families we can relate to directly. Doing this is a little like signing up for a “CSA” (Community Supported Agriculture). It means we get top-quality, super-fresh fish. But it also means we have to learn to roll with the changes each season brings: we can’t just cherry-pick only the most popular fish. Alex explains this in greater detail in the interview in Talking Fish I mentioned earlier. I hope you’ll have a look.

And almost everything we buy comes to us whole. In fact, it drives Alex crazy to hear about fish buyers needing DNA tests to tell a cod from a haddock. That just seems shocking to someone who knows them as animals, literally, of different stripes.

It’s true not everyone on our team has spent as much time around fish as Alex has. We really do want you to ask us where our fish is coming from, and we want the people who are serving you to know the answers. To get there, we’ll have to become better teachers. I’m thinking now about how to help everyone on our staff know as much as they can about what makes the seafood they’re working with every day something truly awesome.

From there, we’re one step closer to introducing all of our customers to some of the great privileges of being so close to the source. There are Andrew’s oysters, of course. Barbara’s clams. There’s the cod our spit of land is named for. And there’s so much more. Like Alex told Talking Fish: “Yes, the cod out here is fantastic, but so is the pollock, the hake, the mackerel and the squid.”

This Sunday, November 6th, Alex is teaching a fish filleting class at our market in Truro Center. Come join us, there from 12 noon to on o’clock.