Recipe: Skate Wing Cakes with Caveats

Teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime. Teach me a really good fish recipe, and I eat well. Teach me a good recipe for skate wing cakes, and I just might die and go to heaven, depending on my definition of heaven, and assuming there is such a place, or even an afterlife at all. You take a one-and-a-half-pound skate wing, fresh and without the skin. Look for pink to white flesh. Avoid specimens that appear to be bruised. An ammonia smell means either they've been sitting in the market for too long, or someone has spilled ammonia on them.

So, you've bought your skate wing, and it's a one-and-a-half pound skate wing, fresh and without the skin, and you're at home now - if you're homeless, this recipe may not be for you. However, if you can get some water boiling in a shallow metal container, say, over an oil-drum fire, long enough to poach your skate wing, the result can be equally delicious. Try it on a bed of baby greens or a mixture of arugula and Boston lettuce, with buerre noire drizzled over the top.

But let's assume you've bought your skate wing, and it's a one-and-a-half pound skate wing, fresh and with neither skin nor ammonia on it, and you've waded through the red tape of Section 8 housing or in some other way secured yourself a domicile that includes a kitchen with a stove and utensils. You poach your skate wing until its meat at the thickest point can be easily lifted away from the cartilage; take the meat from both sides and put it in a bowl. Throw away the remaining cartilage, or, ideally, donate it to a program in your neighborhood that takes old skate wing cartilage and turns it into contact lenses for the poor. Let the meat cool in the fridge or the dark corner of an underpass during damp weather.

Mince the white and green parts of a bunch of scallions, enough for half a cup. Beat two eggs in a small bowl. Add both to the cooled skate meat, assuming troops haven't bulldozed your neighborhood, burnt down your house, and stolen or ruined your skate meat while it was cooling. Mash it all together with a fork or fork-shaped piece of matter with the tensile strength of a fork. Add two teaspoons of garlic powder, one-and-a-half tablespoons of matzo meal or cracker crumbs, salt and pepper to taste. Add a small amount of hot chili if you wish to and have the means. Let the mixture set for at least 30 minutes.

Form the mixture into patties. If they don't hold together, add more matzo meal, or cracker crumbs, or flour, or even plaster dust, as a binder. Dust the bottom and top of each patty with matzo meal or what-have-you. Heat up some peanut or canola oil in a skillet or on any flat piece of metal not coated with anything that might become toxic when heated. (Note: Do not use skillets or other cooking utensils, makeshift or otherwise, made of depleted uranium! Although the jury is still out on the hazard they present to human health, the fact is they are very heavy and so difficult to clean that they're really not worth the bother.)

Fry until light brown with dark brown mottling on each side - the skate wing cakes, not you. Serve hot or cold with sour cream, yogurt, creme fraiche, hollandaise sauce, or buerre noir. They're delicious served on a bed of baby greens or a mixture of arugula and Boston lettuce. Any steamed or boiled tuber will do wonderfully as a side dish. Serve with a dry, medium-bodied white wine, or with water that has been treated or boiled for at least an hour and strained through cheesecloth. Men, pregnant or nursing women, non-pregnant-nor-nursing women, children, infants, adolescents and the elderly should strive to escape impoverished conditions to avoid health problems associated with pollution, war, unsafe drinking water, homelessness, and arbitrary confinement and torture by state or paramilitary agencies.

Still, if you've somehow managed to escape the deadly void of space or the plasmifying interior of a star or the crushing singularity of a black hole; if you've avoided the molten core of the earth or being frozen in the Arctic or Antarctic or drowned in the ocean or parched in the desert or massacred or starved or buried alive; if you've somehow - in a universe the vast majority of which is uninhabitably hostile to human life - come to inhabit one of the habitable regions in this thin skin we call "the biosphere," this tiny, frail, bubble-membrane of viability in the infinite cosmic waste of unfeeling deadliness - and you have access to a good fish market, I urge you to try your hand at making these delightful treats. They're cheaper and easier to make than crab cakes, much easier than tarantula cakes, and taste just as good or better!

The important lesson I want to leave you with is this: don't be intimidated into thinking you can't create seafood delicacies as good as those served in the finest restaurants.

Photo by Christopher Schoen