How to eat fish

Dear readers, this is what a fish looks like when it arrives on your plate, cooked.
I show two pictures,

Fish, cooked, on plate, Italy

On the left, fish in Italy.

Note that the fish more or less looks like a fish and it has a head on it.

Fish, cooked, on plate, USA

On the right, fish in the USA.
Note that it has been reorganized into a box shape and breaded and fried.








To those of you who grew up eating only the fish on the right (fish sticks, aka fish fingers) I can only say that I am very sorry for you.

To help you out, in case you ever come across a real fish, I have provided this handy guide to how to eat a fish.  You can do this with a fork and knife without getting your hands dirty.  Having a second smaller dish to hold the discarded parts is handy but not essential.  The example fish I used here was cooked in a tomato sauce, but the same steps apply no matter how it's cooked.  You will also need some good bread.

First step, cut off the head.

Make an incision more or less behind the gills, find the spine, and cut through it.  Put the head aside, we'll come back to it.

 Now take the body of the fish and split it into two parts.  To do so, make an incision down the top of the fish all the way from front to tail, down clear until you feel you're hitting the spine.

Make a similar cut from the bottom up.

When you've made those cuts, using the fork and knive you gingerly lift one half of the fish up and over so it now lays open faced.

Now slide the knife under the spine on which ever half of the fish was left with a spine, and cut away the spine from the tail.  If the fish was cooked properly, you will just life the whole spine out without having to struggle.

Put the spine on the scrap plate with the head.

Now you need to work the two open halves of the fish and remove any small bones that are left.  There could be a few. There will be big ones nearer to the gills and small ones anywhere.

The close up on the right shows the procedure to use to pull the bigger bones from the area close to the gills:  slide the knife under them and then lift the bones away, helping with the fork.

These are the two halves after the cleaning.  Now we can start to eat.

Close up of one side.

There could still be some small bones left.
They're most likely to be hiding between folds in the fish or in the sauce.

Be on the lookout.

Once you've eaten the fish, you need the bread to clean the plate.   The sauce that's surrounding the fish is so good that you don't want it to go to waste.

Now we go back to look at our plate of scraps.  This is what we had left over.

We've got the head, the spine, random bones, some skin, etc.

Let's take a close look at the head.

What's that in the head?  More meat and sauce.

Take your knife and dig out the meat, and scrape and pull out the sauce. If no one is watching you can put the whole head to your mouth and such the sauce out.

I'm by no means an expert in working fish heads, but I did what I could and cleaned mine, here's an after picture.  See how all the sauce has been cleaned away?   You can also see between the before and after pictures that large pieces of white meat were pulled out.

If you skip this step, you'll be missing out on some of the best parts of the fish.

Bon Appetit!