Salmon Cacciatore

Plus a Rita Dove poem for a university bellringer...

Hi, friends. I’ve been feeling disembodied, discombobulated lately. I don’t know if it’s the weight of what is happening in the world, particularly in Gaza, or the way this fall’s election seems to be rushing at us with vertiginous and horrifying speed…or maybe it’s all of that, and post-mastectomy weirdness, traveling for work a lot, and all the little transitions of spring. Today is May Day, the day that has marked spring in the Northern Hemisphere since ancient times—the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. (The four days a year that are seasonal midpoints between equinox and solstice are known as cross-quarter days.) It’s also International Workers’ Day, a time to celebrate the power of collective labor action. And appropriately, on Sunday, I’ll be on my way to Sacramento to speak at the SEIU’s California Nurse Alliance. And trying to live in hope, because we gotta.

What’s for dinner?

We buy salmon—or salmon’s cousin Arctic char—just about every week, and usually Amol cooks it very simply, crisping the skin, and Mira eats it up. But this week there was a bell pepper getting wrinkly in the fridge and we had the last of a really good package of bacon, and so I was thinking about cacciatore, the “hunter style” Italian stewy dish of peppers, tomatoes, herbs, mushrooms and pancetta, often made with chicken.

Instead of slow-cooked bone-in chicken, I adapted the idea to a fast, weeknight skillet of bacon, mushrooms and quick-simmered aromatics, topped with the fish, doused in olive oil, and broiled. It’s a dish that feels right in warmer weather, but basically has no season. You can also easily adapt it to what you have on hand. The only tricky thing about it is making sure you cook the bacon-mushroom mixture for long enough that the mushroom’s liquid boils off, and the mushrooms start to brown. In the end, before you proceed, it should look something like this:

Did Mira eat this? Absolutely not. Well, she ate the fish, but made sure to scrape it clean of any of the sauce. I thought that the mushroom-bacon combo—two things she likes—would entice her, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the Cooked Tomato and Pepper Problem (tm). Maybe your child doesn’t have that problem!

Salmon Cacciatore

Serves 4

4 bacon slices (about 4 ounces), thinly sliced
10 ounces mushrooms (such as shiitake, crimini, oyster), sliced
Kosher salt
6 garlic cloves, smashed and chopped
1 bell pepper, stemmed, seeded and thinly sliced
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 (12-ounce) jar roasted red peppers, drained
1 (14.5-ounce) can fire-roasted diced tomatoes
2 to 3 tablespoons fresh chopped herbs, such as rosemary, oregano, parsley and/or sage, optional
4 (6- to 8-ounce) salmon or Arctic char fillets (or other meaty fish fillet of your choice)
1/4 cup olive oil
Grated Parmesan, for serving
Red pepper flakes, for serving, optional

1. Put the bacon in an ovenproof skillet over medium heat. Cook until the pan is slicked with rendered fat, 5 minutes.

2. Increase the heat to medium-high. Add the mushrooms and a big pinch of salt, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms have given off their liquid, that liquid has boiled away, and the mushrooms and bacon shrink and brown, 8 to 15 minutes, depending on the moisture content of your mushrooms. (See photo above.)

3. Stir in the garlic and bell pepper; season with a pinch of salt. Cook until softened and fragrant, about 3 minutes. Add the white wine and let it bubble until the liquid is nearly gone, another 3 minutes.

4. Stir in the roasted red peppers, tomatoes, and herbs, if using. Stir and taste the sauce. Add more salt if necessary. Preheat the broiler on high with a rack 4 to 5 inches from the heat source.

5. Lay the fish filets on top of the sauce. Pour the olive oil over the top and season the fish generously with salt. Broil for 5 to 8 minutes, until the fish is browned and just flakes. Exact timing will depend on the thickness of the fillets.

6. Serve the fish and sauce in shallow bowls and top with Parmesan and red pepper.
   
   
   

Opinion Soup

In reporting for Taking Care, I came across a Rita Dove poem about Henry Martin, who was born into slavery at Monticello—and born on the 4th of July, the very same day that his enslaver, Thomas Jefferson, died. Martin was sold away from Monticello to settle Jefferson’s debts and was then enslaved at the University of Virginia, where he was forced to serve as a nurse during the Civil War.

After the war, he went on working at the university as a free man, as the campus bellringer. He made the chapel bell toll the hour for 50 more years, until his retirement in 1909.

In a 1914 yearbook interview, he remembered nursing hundreds of wounded young men in the university’s grand Rotunda. “When I go in now,” he said, “I’m thinking on the soldiers that I seen laying on the floor.” Forced to nurse, to try to put these bodies back together, he still saw the humanity in the young men who were fighting and dying, in essence, to keep him enslaved.

Dove’s poem about Martin, The Bellringer, is available to read in full at The New Yorker. Here’s a little excerpt:

…

I am no longer a dreadful coincidence
nor debt crossed off in a dead man’s ledger;
I am not summoned, dismissed –

I am the clock’s keeper. I ring in their ears.
And every hour, down in that
shining, blistered republic,
someone will pause to whisper
Henry! – and for a moment

my name flies free.

I love that.

See you next week, friends!