Fish Recipes

The first time I ate crab properly, I was seventeen and sitting on a plastic chair that kept sinking into the sand at a beach hut past Keamari, the Karachi harbour behind me and a platter of red-shelled crabs in front of me that looked like they might still make a run for it. My …

The first time I ordered this apollo fish recipe at a Hyderabadi-style restaurant near Tariq Road, the waiter did something waiters almost never do — he tried to talk me out of it. “Sir, it is full spicy,” he said, in the tone of a man delivering a legal warning. “Not medium. Full.” I told …

My first real taste of a goan fish curry recipe done properly was not in a restaurant at all. It was in my friend Reema’s kitchen in Karachi, cooked by her mother, who grew up in Margao and talks to her fishmonger like a general to an old soldier. She set a steel plate in …

My first plate of koliwada arrived by accident. I was in Mumbai years ago, trailing a friend through the lanes near the fishing docks while she haggled over pomfret, and the rain that had been threatening all afternoon finally broke. We ducked under the awning of a tiny eatery run by a Koli family, and …

The fish fry recipe I grew up on was never written anywhere. It lived in my father’s hands — the way he crushed ajwain between his palms over the fish, the way he judged the tawa by holding a hand above it and counting slowly to three. On winter evenings in Lahore, when the fish …

There was a fish my grandmother refused to let anyone else cook. Kajoli came home from the river market in a small bundle of banana leaf, a dozen or so tiny silver fish no longer than my finger, and the kitchen door stayed shut until she emerged with a shallow plate held high like an …

An aar never arrived at our house quietly. It came in my father’s two hands, held like a trophy from the morning bazaar — a river catfish so long its tail curled past his elbow, silver-grey and gleaming. My mother would clear the biggest board she owned, my grandmother would sharpen her boti and deliver …

The fish-seller’s basket held the whole argument. Growing up, there was one small estuary fish my father would abandon his newspaper for: topshe, barely longer than his hand, silver-green with whiskers fine as sewing thread. He would bring home a kilo wrapped in newspaper, and by the time the evening tea went on, the house …

Some fish arrive at the market like celebrities, and some arrive like neighbours. Tangra has always been the neighbour kind. Growing up, the fish-seller who cycled past our lane in the mornings kept the big rohu and katla under a wet cloth for customers he wanted to impress, but the tangra sat out in front …

The first time I saw muithya being made, I was ten years old and quietly horrified. Our neighbour, an elderly lady from Barisal whom everyone called Khala, had a whole chitol fish in front of her — a fish we children considered mostly bones and bad attitude — and she was attacking it with the …