The Sea, the sea…cooking on a tall ship

COOKING ON A TALL SHIP

Cooking on a Tall ship

After losing Stephen and leaving my life in Northern Italy for the UK, I was desparate to keep the adventure in our life going and post traumatic growth is one of those syndromes that can actually work for you if you let it.

During this time, I had a lot of ideas, some of them crazy, wired and unnecessary, and some of them crazy, wired and ABSOLUTELY necessary.

The biggest one of these was signing up to crew and cook on Pilgrim, a former Brixham trawler now operating as a Tall Ship charter vessel, taking guests around my beloved West Country coast and to the beautiful Scilly and Channel Islands.

I hadn’t really had much experience of sailing before, save an introductory course in the Bay of Genoa a few years ago, where I spent most of the time drinking wine with the Captain and came away with no real idea of one end of a boat from the other, and certainly no idea how to move one across a body of water.

But it did make me fall in love with the idea of sailing, or at least cooking on a boat, so this idea I took down to the south Devon coast and began sail training on the beautiful, historic, and very big Pilgrim.

We set sail for the first time on my husband’s birthday, at 4am. The sun rose gently and slowly, as it does in February, a gradual shift in light that thawed the ice on deck but still let us see the shooting stars in the West Country sky. Dolphins graced the bow, so many of them! Maybe 20 in one pod and they stayed with us off and on throughout the day, as we raced against the weather to the Cornish coast. They are seen as good omens and protectors of sailors, and this feeling of protection is something that I felt strongly on that trip, despite the biggest storms in history being about to hit the South West.

The degree of protection I felt on that first trip is not a new idea - superstitious sailors put a lot of store in talismans and protection. Female deities were seen to play a protective role in looking after a ship and her crew, ships often having female figureheads. The Latin word for ship, Navis, is feminine and all ships are adressed as ‘she’, which made me feel in a cliched way that there was a link between mother nature and the boat, and a definate female, creative energy I could harness.

The constant motion of sailing, of harnessing what power you see around you is very soothing in deep grief. Olga Tokarczuk writes about the Beiguni, an ancient sect who believe being in constant motion is a trick to avoid evil. I’m not sure grief is evil but the feeling of moving forward using only nature is a powerful antidote for it.

Pilgrim lives in Brixham, Devon, where you can still buy fish off the boats and is home to Brixham Fish Market, the largest fishery in England, so getting fresh fish is easier than ……Baked mackerel with rhubarb is a speciality of the West country. This is something I cooked for the crew, using rhubarb I had frozen.

brixham mackerel with rhubarb, cayenne and marmalade sauce

1 Ib chopped rhubarb - makes 3 cups. a 12 oz pack of frozen rhubarb equals 1 1/2 cups. One tin is 540g, which is just over 2 cups.

juice of 3 oranges

zest of one

generous 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

2 tbsp coarse dark marmalade

salt and pepper

Throw everything into a pot, bring to the boil and simmer until a syrupy consistency

can puree if you like

serve hot with baked mackerel

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Using a sharp knife, make a few slashes in skin on both sides of fish. Transfer to a parchment-lined baking sheet. Drizzle fish on both sides with oil; season with salt and pepper. Arrange a few lemon slices in cavity, and tuck the rest underneath fish. Tuck a handful of herbs into cavity; coarsely chop remainder and sprinkle over fish. Roast until fish is opaque and cooked through, 20 to 25 minutes.