Why ‘seacuterie’ will be the only platter that matters
Elaborately cured slivers of fish are coming to a dinner party near you, says Debora Robertson
Put the olives back in the jar. Let that Parma ham rest a little longer in its wax paper. There is a new food trend sweeping the nation and its name is seacuterie. While raw and cured fish has been a high-end restaurant treat for more than a decade, and food industry trend reports have touted it as the next big thing for a few years, it’s the fishy catch that never quite landed at home.
But that might be about to change. This year’s Waitrose & Partners Food and Drink Report, published today, lists seacuterie as a trend to watch, and I don’t know about you, but I just don’t want to live in a world where Waitrose might ever be wrong.
My kitchen is already stocked for a small siege, with enough of their on-trend supermarketerie (I just made that word up, Waitrose, but you are very welcome to it) – tahini, grains, Middle-eastern seasonings, chilli sauces, craft beer and crumpets of many nations – that I’m prepared to trust that scallop bresaola may well be cosying up with the Parmesan in my fridge this time next year.
But what exactly is seacuterie? The report calls it “reimagined charcuterie”, but using surf instead of turf. “In recent years we’ve seen UK chefs turning out classic meat-based charcuterie to rival anything produced on the Continent,” says Amber Dalton, editor of The Good Food Guide. “So it makes perfect sense that they’d look to the sea’s bounty to create intriguing new dishes using time-honoured preserving techniques.”
Where I live in east London, I’m surrounded by ham hobbyists and bacon botherers – people preserving, curing, salting and air-drying as though their very recherché, raffiné lives depended on it. So I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to find my man-bunned neighbours at the forefront of the seacuterie wave.
Some trace its present incarnation to late-eighties Brooklyn, when chef David Burke served pastrami salmon at his Park Avenue Café, using the same curing technique as that used to make gravadlax but with kosher salt, cayenne pepper, paprika, coriander seeds and molasses. Then the flavour-forward fishy trend spread to Australia, where the pickling, fermenting, smoking and even ageing of fish became fashionable.
Now, at Cornerstone restaurant in Hackney Wick (Brooklyn, Sydney, Hackney are to food what New York, London, Paris are to fashion), chef Tom Brown serves up salmon pastrami, grey mullet tartare and citrus-cured brill to adventurous eaters. Up west, Ramael Scully offers his diners dry-aged halibut (with mustard-seed potato, coconut rempah and peanut) at his chic restaurant, Scully St James’s.
‘Fragile seafood dishes are perfect for the small-plate and sharing-platter ethos’
In truth, many of these “new” techniques and seemingly adventurous, sophisticated combinations sit comfortably within the age-old tradition of preserving and preparing fish to enhance its flavour and quality. The seacuterie of today (or, more correctly perhaps, tomorrow) is just the latest way to enjoy it. Bacalao, rillettes de poisson, smoked salmon, ceviche, gravadlax, pickled herring – almost every culture has its favourite form of cured fish.
According to Waitrose, a third of us are eating less meat than we did two years ago, and a quarter of us say we plan to look for better quality meat and fish. Seacuterie might well be a concept whose time has come.
Cured and otherwise preserved fish can be a highly delicious option to make a small amount go a long way. The flavours of expensive, fragile seafood are intensified by curing, so our palates allow us to enjoy them in smaller amounts, making this a more sustainable way of using and appreciating what are highly precious resources.
These dishes are also perfect for the small-plate and sharing-platter ethos that has become so prevalent, both in restaurants and at home. Who would want to share a delicately poached fillet – the very thought of numerous forks diving into its creamy flesh is anxiety-makingly unappetising. But imagine a plate of tuna bresaola, scallop mortadella or salmon pastrami, elegantly laid out and served with your first crisp glass of white of the evening. It sounds incredibly tempting and chic.
Few of us may be making such elaborate preparations at home any time soon, but it is quite exciting to contemplate seeing them on menus. After all, as a seafaring nation, we should be good at this. Instead of exporting so much of our wonderful seafood, perhaps we should be preserving, pickling and curing it, putting fish front and centre, in the mainstream, where it belongs.