Smoked Herring and Potato Salad- Meze a la Zakuski (with a Blowtorch)

Greece is rich in fish. Beside the teeming wine dark seas, even the smallest of neighborhood markets will have a fair selection of various smoked, salted, and oil packed fish- accompaniment to white bean soup and enjoyed on their own with ouzo (the licorice-sweetness invites vibrant salty bites). The humblest and least expensive (this one was about two euroes fifty) of these is the whole smoked, skin-on, head-on herring.

It needs a little work, but what fun work! The skin is tough- fire though makes it peel away from the fish all by itself. You can do this with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol and stuck on the tines of a fork, but for drama and speed, a blowtorch is perfect. I wanted one from the cooking supply but impetuousness found me a rough (and cheap) one from the hardware store- less precise, fun to wield. Just keep the fish away from anything that can catch fire, and train the flame on it, working your way all over the surface of the fish

the skin just comes away by itself

leaving the glow of char behind.

The dark, coarse-textured flesh can be ripped easily from the center bone, and the smaller bones tweezed from these rough fillets with with your fingertips. Short and viscerally satisfying work yields a tangle of smoky, salty, richly oily meat. If you are lucky, it also yields an egg sack-

stuffed with densely packed, firm, popping and nearly crunchy super-smoky eggs. They are vividly flavored, but smeared over a thick layer of sweet butter on some bread they are all rustic refinement- the deluxe mountain lodge of canapes- and a lot of them. Ask for a fish that is full around the belly to increase your chances.

So that's it for the fish. The smoky and chewy longs for crisp and sweet- for the niceness of onion with none of the nastiness, pickled onions are worth the very small effort. All you do is thinly slice the onions and put them in some icy water:

after ten minutes or so, squeeze them gently. The water will turn milky-

that's all the sharpness of the onion in that cloudiness. Repeat this a couple of times and still more sharpness will be rinsed away. Sweeten, perfume, and liven them up by adding some vinegar, a bay leaf, and some whole allspice berries and whole black peppercorns

These want a little time to mingle- if they're wanted right away, warm them to speed things up (even in a microwave). The sweet spiced vinegar itself is also good.

In the meantime, we will have boiled a couple of potatoes in salted water (it should taste like the sea). It's good if the potatoes are freshly boiled and still warm. All that's left do do is peel them and cut them into large pieces and mound the shreds of smoky fish in the middle. Dress with this:

5 ml/ 1 tsp dijon mustard

10 ml. 2 T vinegar from the onions

80 ml/ 1/3 C olive oil

a few grindings of pepper

a dash of salt (the potatoes have been cooked in salted water and the herring has plenty of salt too).

Cover the salad with the onions, some chopped parsley, maybe some capers. This is crazy good with ouzo on ice, gently watered down and cloudy white. Warm potatoes, icy ouzo, chewy salty smoke, fresh bright parsley, the onions sweet and crunchy- it is perpetually satisfying, each bite or sip priming the next, as the time at table lengthens- the mark of a successful dish.