Xanthe Clay’s guide to cooking flat fish
Flat fish are good eating at bargain prices, says Xanthe Clay, no matter what you call them
What’s in a name? The sweet sound of the cash till ringing, or so say the fish marketeers. With this in mind, megrim, one of the biggest catches of the South West, is being renamed Cornish sole by Seafood Cornwall, part of the Cornish Fish Producers’ Organisation. The aim is to make them more appetising to us, by combining the wholesome connotations of the fisherfolk of the South West with a familiar, if technically inaccurate, word – sole.
No, megrim isn’t a real sole, being from the same family as turbot and brill, although not in their league gastronomically. The one true sole is the Dover sole, and slip sole which is a small Dover sole. Lemon sole isn’t a sole either, but a relative of halibut and dab. To be fair, Dover sole hasn’t got much to do with Dover since it’s fished from Scotland to the Mediterranean.
Never mind that. Despite a British catch of close to 5,000 tonnes a year, a thousand of those coming into Newlyn, we Britons have had pretty much no interest in buying megrim. Megs, as fishermen call them, have a low “fish counter appeal”, with an anaemic transparency to the skin, which makes their innards visible. Guts: never a good look.
Happily the Spanish love them, calling them gallo (cockerel) which is better than the other English name, whiff. Until recent upheavals over Brexit and Covid, almost all the megrim were sold to the Continent, but with much current uncertainty around fish sales, urgent rebranding was in order. Thus Seafood Cornwall, partly funded by the European Union, has decided to accelerate plans to take the grim out of megrim and reintroduce them as Cornish sole.
It’s a ploy that’s worked before. Take pilchards, once a staple of British suppers but more recently rejected as smelly and unsexy. By 1997, sales had been in the doldrums for decades. Then some bright spark suggested renaming them Cornish sardines, and they joined Med veg and Provencal rosé to became the darling of every hipster barbecue.
This time it’s a bit more complicated, according to Mike Warner, a seafood consultant and fish seller based in East Anglia. “Pilchard is mainly a southcoast fish – the majority in Cornish waters,” he says. “So as it is almost exclusive to that bit of coastline calling them Cornish makes sense. But megrim is much more widespread, and an awful lot is caught in Scottish waters.”
According to Paul Trebilcock, of the CFPO, the new brand is meant to be just for fish landed in Cornish ports. “It’s about more than a name,” he says. “We are defining the fleet that catch and land it, and watching the state of the stock – which is different from the stock in the North Sea and west Scotland. Ours has been assessed by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea’s independent scientists as sustainable.”
I’m concerned that the name “Cornish sole” is too vague, and could be misunderstood, or misused, to cover Dover sole, Torbay sole (another name for a flat fish called witch) and lemon sole caught in Cornwall. Fish fraud is real, especially as once a fish is filleted it is very hard to prove, without DNA testing, that it is not what it is labelled.
Trebilcock is reassuring. “If it causes confusion, we’ll have to take another look at it,” he says. “We are trying to take barriers away from people. If at the end there is a way we can clarify, I’m sure we will do that.”
The real point, he stresses, is to encourage people to buy more kinds of British fish. We land hundreds of kinds in the UK, yet 70 per cent or more of what we eat is limited to five varieties: salmon, cod, haddock, tuna and prawns – with tuna always and prawns often imported. Lesser flat fish are particularly neglected, for although A-list flat fish such as Dover sole, turbot, and brill, and the second-tier plaice and lemon sole are reasonably familiar, few now buy the likes of witch, dab and megrim.
It’s crazy, when they are good eating, especially cooked on the bone – they are less bony than round fish like salmon or mackerel. The prices are bargain basement, too. You’ll probably have to ask your fishmonger to order them, but it’ll be worth it – whatever they are called.
Flat fish have both eyes on the same side of the head, and it’s one of the ways they are identified. Lay a fish lengthways in front of you, making sure the eyes are above the mouth. If the eyes are facing left, it’s one of the left-eyed or sinistral fish, and is a turbot, megrim or brill. If it’s facing right, it is a right-eyed or dextral fish, which covers most of the rest – although occasional anomalies occur