In the pink for cod’s sake

IN THE LATE 1960s, my mother used to buy taramasalata from the two Greek Cypriot shops that used to be in London’s Goodge Street area: one was in Charlotte Street, the other in Goodge Street. Taramasalata is a pink* paste made with fish roe (‘taramas’ in Greek; ‘tarama’ in Turkish).  I still enjoy eating the stuff. Typically, good taramasalata contains about 8 to 10 % cod’s roe by weight and other ingredients. When my mother discovered that most of the bulk of the taramasalata was bread, she felt swindled. She felt that it was unfair to describe taramasalata as a fish paste when most of what was in the container was bread. It was, she felt, an expensive way to purchase soggy bread.

So, one day she decided that she would make her own taramasalata, and hers, unlike that which she had purchased from the Greek Cypriot shops, would be unadulterated with bread. Her version omitted the bread. The result was so incredibly salty that it was inedible. What she had demonstrated was that the traditional way to prepare this fishy dip using bread was not a load of ‘codswallop’.

[* There is also a white version]