Shooting and fishing: Cod's own puts in an appearance

Published on Wednesday 27 August 2008 15:11

They used to serve lieu at Petit Paris in Edinburgh's Grassmarket. When we first spotted it on the menu I grandly pronounced it to be plaice, which was pretty silly.

"Well it obviously isn't, as lieu is a place, and anyway a plaice is a flat fish and whatever it is that table over there is having it's quite clearly not a flat fish – it's something like pollock," my wife hissed in that exasperated tone reserved for small children in public places.

On these occasions you have to bow to superior knowledge, especially as she was once an au pair to a French family and can claim the linguistic high ground on these matters. So we had the lieu and it was brilliant and it turned out not to be pollock at all, which is lieu jaune, but coley or saithe, another member of the cod family which is also lieu, but lieu noir. But I suppose you are meant to know that lieu is coley and not pollock. Never mind.

Pollock was the first fish I ever caught as a child on holiday in Devon. We brought them back to the hotel in Newton Ferrers which cooked them for high tea and they are remembered (by me) as the most delicious fish ever to come from the sea, although cooks tend to pronounce them bony.

Since then I hadn't consciously looked a pollock in the eye nor even heard speak of the fish until I was standing the other day in a large, smoke-filled agricultural shed with 500 other barbecuees, hanging onto a hamburger and a plastic mug of ros, when I heard a voice say, "... and do you know we had 30 pollock in as many minutes...".

The speaker was a notorious fisherman, notorious in that all he seems to do when he is not shooting or driving tractors, is fish. His main claim to fame in my eyes is that he once took tufts of the soft pale tummy hair from our late golden retriever Tigger, tied a fly with it and caught a salmon, declaring that golden retriever hair was far superior to Pekinese hair which went straight to the bottom. Anyway.

He had had a son-in-law staying and had taken him fishing, probably whether he liked it or not, on a smart beat of the Dee or the Spey (he loyally refused to name it) and had caught nothing. "Not a sausage," he said, waving a brace of barbecued bangers in the air by way of illustration.

The dejected duo had repaired to the family holiday cottage at Crovie on the Moray Firth (Crovie is to the north-east of Scotland what Elie is to Fife; there is only one local left but the village is tiresomely picturesque). At Crovie they had spotted what they thought were mackerel off the old pier which juts out at right angles to the shore by the sewage outfall, and started casting with the salmon rod, a floating line and a Silver Stoat's Tail fly about an inch long because that was what was on the line already. The water was flat calm and they could see fish, or at least see that the surface was ruffled by fish. Within a couple of minutes they were hauling out pollock. The secret appears to have been to keep the fly moving in the water, retrieving it quite quickly in one-metre long jerks. We must put Petit Paris on pollock alert.

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