It all started when David Bolton, a dear friend with whom I used to work and play — often at the same time — in Provincetown on Cape Cod in the early 1970s, sent me a couple of pages from Howard Mitcham’s “Provincetown Seafood Cookbook,” which had been posted on a Provincetown Facebook page. Howard, who passed away in 1996, is still legendary in Provincetown and beyond as a chef, artist, poet, cookbook author, and one-of-a-kind character. He was born in Mississippi in 1917 and regularly wrote food columns for The Provincetown Advocate. Spending part of his life in New Orleans, he brought Creole and Cajun cuisines to the heavily Portuguese-influenced kitchens of Provincetown. The seaside town was a perfect destination in that it embraced the talented Howard and his larger-than-life personality.
I’d lost Howard’s “Provincetown Seafood Cookbook” in one of my moves, and I was motivated to buy it again. His classic cookbook was first published in 1975 and was re-released in 2018 with a forward by Anthony Bourdain, who had begun his culinary career in Provincetown. In Anthony’s forward, he declares the cookbook as one of the most influential in his life.
Howard was known as a prodigious drinker and mad man in a town full of heavy-drinking mad men and women during the 1970s, when Provincetown was a mostly isolated, affordable sanctuary for artists, writers, fishermen, hippies, seekers, reprobates, and society’s refugees living on the fringes. It’s long been a destination for members of the LGBTQ community, but especially served as a refuge during a time when so many were just emerging from the closet.
Due to its New England fishing village charm and uninhibited atmosphere, the town’s impossibly narrow, winding main street, Commercial Street, is jammed in the summer with tourists. When I lived in and around Provincetown in the late 1960s and early 1970s, tourists spent their time rummaging through gift shop chachka and postcards, deciding which leather shop made the “right” custom sandals, and being sucked into shops advertising handmade turquoise jewelry. They would also spend their time simply strolling around town gawking at the hippies and “the gays” while scarfing foot-long hot dogs and fried clams. The atmosphere in the summer was part freak show, part Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. It was always an open question, depending on one’s lifestyle, whether the tourists or the locals were the freaks. During the winter, Commercial Street would be mostly empty.
At the time, many of Provincetown’s residents made just enough money during the short but intense summer tourist season to survive the winter supplemented by unemployment benefits and working the odd job under the table. This allowed them time to do what they really wanted to do, which may have included working on macrame and tie-dye, refining their painting and writing skills, stepping out for a night at The Surf Club to listen to The Provincetown Jug and Marching Band, or simply holing up anytime day or night at The Fo’c’sle for shots and beers with their neighbors.
It was the time of an awakening global consciousness, when people were beginning to recycle and reuse to avoid burying our planet under mountains of plastic, aluminum cans, and garbage. Two women I knew took the concept of recycling to its furthest absurd conclusion by making necklaces, which they planned to sell to tourists the following season, from enamel painted “beads” creatively made from rabbit turds left by their pet bunny.
I can’t claim I really knew Howard, but I did spend a memorable, however fuzzy, evening with him when I was a pup and he came for dinner while my dad was briefly editor and publisher for The Provincetown Advocate in 1969-70. What I remember of that evening was that much wine was consumed and Howard entertained us by fashioning erotic origami after the dishes were cleared. I should add, Howard had lost his hearing as a child to meningitis, consequently he couldn’t effectively hear how loudly he was speaking. As the evening wore on and the wine continued to flow, our little dinner party became even more raucous because, as Howard’s blood alcohol level rose, so did the unbridled and wildly modulated decibel level of his voice.
The section from Howard’s cookbook which David sent me is entitled, “An Ugly Specimen but Delicious Dining.” The ugly specimen to which Howard is referring is goosefish aka monkfish, its preparation, and how fishing boat Captain Seraphine Codinha shed 120 pounds on a crash diet of nothing but goosefish for several months. If you’re unfamiliar with it, goosefish is a bottom-dwelling anglerfish which can grow up to four feet long and is in contention for the award given to The Most Hideous Creature to Inhabit the Ocean. Its most distinguishing feature is a shockingly humungous head in relation to its body, which is almost entirely encircled by a gaping mouth containing a full set of small, inward-curving razor-sharp teeth. Not to be overlooked, attached to this appallingly ghastly head is what appears to be some sort of demonic tail contributing to its appearance as a creature which must have been spawned in hell. Needless to say, the first person who caught and ate it must have been very hungry indeed.
Among other names for goosefish is the already mentioned monkfish, as well as fishing frog and sea-devil. Its meat is sometimes referred to as “poor man’s lobster,” however, the meat resembles lobster in texture only while its white flesh is mild and not nearly as flavorful as lobster. Due to its meaty texture and mild taste, it’s an excellent addition to a bouillabaisse or spicy Portuguese fisherman’s stew, versions of which were a staple in Provincetown’s once large Portuguese community at a time when seafood was cheap and being unloaded daily from what was a thriving commercial fishing fleet at Town Wharf.
My first encounters with these gruesome-looking fish were as a teenager exploring the bayside sandbars at low tide close to my home in North Truro. Being generally sedentary bottom predators, it’s not unusual for goosefish to become stranded on sandbars as the tide recedes, which is the source of a story as to why it’s also known as monkfish. That name originates from Mont-Saint-Michel, a small French tidal island on which a spectacular fairytale-like abbey sits in a bay between Normandy and Brittany, where the tides are extreme. The sand around the island has built up to a point now that Mont-Saint-Michel is an island only at the very highest tides. However, for much of the time since the 10th century, when the first abbey was built, that tidal area immediately adjacent to the island was known for dangerously swift incoming tides and pockets of quicksand at low tide.
The first story I heard regarding the naming of the monkfish said the Benedictine monks occupying the abbey would go out happily plucking the stranded fish from the surrounding sandbars for their evening meal. Given the dangers of the swift incoming tide and quicksand, I’m not sure the monks would have ever been hungry enough to risk gathering dead fish, especially dead ugly fish, at low tide. To my mind, the more likely, though less picturesque, story is that the monks were given the fish by local fishermen who would save them as their donation to the abbey when few would buy their unappetizing-looking catch.
The brown mottled goosefish normally allow their meals to come to them as they lay camouflaged on the bottom, primarily feeding on fish attracted to a fleshy lure it wriggles about above its enormous mouth from a modified dorsal fin. However, they can be indiscriminate and opportunistic predators. The goosefish moniker originates from feasting on the occasional seabird paddling peacefully along on the surface until a goosefish ruins the moment for the unsuspecting bird by swimming beneath it and swallowing it whole. I’ve repeatedly found reports of one large specimen containing seven ducks!
My next encounter with goosefish was during the summer between high school and college, while working at the now demolished Pond Village Cold Storage in North Truro which was located on the bay between Cold Storage Beach and the railroad right of way where the tracks and station of The Old Colony Railroad had existed from 1873–1960. The large, five-story facility had been a vital cog in the local economy during that time, processing fish gathered from nets positioned just offshore. The fish would then be loaded into barrels and frozen before being stacked into waiting railway cars on the adjacent tracks and shipped to Boston.
By the time I worked at Pond Village Cold Storage or The Fishery as it was known locally, it was a moribund operation with only a few more years of operation left before it was summarily demolished. We processed and froze what were considered “trash fish” which, while perfectly delicious, had little market value. We received the goosefish headless and skinned, however, we were left with the unenviable task of removing a slimy membrane still attached to the flesh. We had to use textured rubber gloves to grasp the tails while we peeled the slime with our boning knives. It was a particularly obnoxious task I never really got used to in a job that wasn’t particularly pleasant except for the stories from the retired Portuguese fishermen who worked there full time. When other so-called trash fish, like butterfish, mackerel, and skate, would appear occasionally among the whiting, which were deemed fit for a mink farm only, my coworkers were an excellent resource for preparing those unwanted gifts from the ocean.
Whenever one of my coworkers or anyone from the Portuguese community on the Outer Cape shared a recipe with me, amounts were always “some” or “a handful” and cooked “for a while” or “until done.” Howard quantified many of those recipes in his “Provincetown Seafood Cookbook” and gave them his legendary chef’s touch. What really makes this cookbook a classic, though, is he was as fine a writer as he was a chef and it’s so much fun to read. His colorful prose can transport you to wherever he first encountered the dish, whether it’s Spain, Portugal, New Orleans or Provincetown, and he’ll clearly describe, in his inimitable way, the whys and wherefores of his techniques. The recipes are sometimes elaborate, but never snobbish, and some require access to seafood not found much inland such as squid, horse mackerel, and fish cheeks, but what do you expect from a book with its title?
As far as goosefish is concerned, it’s hard to believe that a fish with so many disagreeable attributes can make for a wonderful meal, whether in a stew, grilled or cut into medallions and sautéed, but it most certainly can! The most important thing to know about cooking goosefish is it’s not called “poor man’s lobster” for nothing. It cooks more like lobster and should be cooked until just done or it will toughen when overcooked.
Howard provides his two-page section on goosefish at the end of his cookbook, just before his last whimsical recipe for sea serpent in which he warns, if proper procedures aren’t followed “its flavor will be as rank as a dead jellyfish and as tough as petrified mammoth skin.” I suppose the same could be said for the sea serpent’s ugly stepsister, the goosefish, if its slimy-as-a-jellyfish membrane isn’t removed and the fish is vulcanized, as we used to say in restaurant kitchens when something was horribly overcooked.
Portuguese Fisherman’s Stew
Serves 4
All these memories motivated me to make a Portuguese fisherman’s stew, one of my favorite meals from those days. The stew is known as caldeirada in Portugal and there are as many recipes for it as there are Portuguese fishermen, but the ones I’m familiar with are tomato based and contain linguica or chorizo and potatoes. This stew comes together relatively quickly and is light enough for summer, but substantial enough for winter. I like to include mussels, as much for their flavor as their meat. Use whatever firm fish or shellfish you like and is freshest, including goosefish if you can get it, as this dish is best when the seafood is varied. The stew demands being served with some good crusty bread to sop up the broth.
Ingredients
1 large pinch of saffron
½ cup dry white wine
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion (1½ cups) in approximately ½-inch dice
1 Tbl thinly sliced garlic
1 medium green bell pepper (1 cup) in approximately ½-inch dice
½ lb chorizo, quartered horizontally, peeled, and cut in approximately ¼-inch slices
(1) 14.5-oz can diced tomatoes
3 cups fish stock or clam juice
1 large Yukon gold potato (1 cup) in approximately ½-inch dice
1 Tbl minced fresh oregano or ½ tsp dry
1½ lb firm-fleshed fish, ideally two different types, cut into eighths
24 mussels
1 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 cup coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley
Method
Soak the saffron in the white wine for at least 20 minutes while gathering the rest of the ingredients.
Sauté the diced onions in the olive oil for 4–5 minutes over medium heat in a Dutch oven or equivalent until the onions begin to become clear.
Add the garlic, green peppers, and chorizo and sauté for another 3–4 minutes.
Add the saffron-infused white wine and allow to come up to a simmer for a minute or two to dissipate the alcohol.
Add the can of diced tomatoes, fish stock, oregano, and potatoes and simmer for 7–8 minutes until the potatoes are tender. The broth can be made ahead until this point.
Place the 1½ lb of fish in a separate skillet with a cover, add a couple of ladles of the broth, cover, and simmer over medium-low heat until the flesh is opaque while heating the broth to a simmer.
When the broth comes to a simmer, add the mussels and the shrimp, cover, and cook for a couple of minutes until all the mussels have opened.
Place 2 pieces of the cooked fish in the bottom of warmed, wide, and shallow bowls. Stir in the chopped parsley to the broth with the mussels and shrimp and ladle over the cooked fish in the heated bowls.
