Miso-Glazed Monkfish, dedicated to Steve Connolly's Fish Market
Wandering grocery store aisles with a cart can feel as isolating as walking in the woods alone. But many grocery stores still retain a fish counter, where you can experience that retail model of consumer to vendor across a glass case: there’s eye contact, a decision, a transaction, a deal is made between two humans that results in fish for dinner. Some days that’s as good as the human race gets.
On Cape Ann we now have new ways to purchase local fish: You can buy fish online in advance, and even have it delivered each week to your door, from Cape Ann Fresh Catch. At Fisherman’s Wharf you drive up to the window of a truck in downtown Gloucester, tell them what you want, and they hand you a bag of fish that you have not yet seen. This last almost contact-less system was born out of covid. Both ways remove something from the original graphics of person, case full of fish, fishmonger.
The pandemic, we learned just after Christmas, closed for ever our favorite situation like this, the Gloucester fish market, Steve Connolly’s. (Here’s a Gloucester Times article about it: https://www.gloucestertimes.com/news/steve-connolly-seafood-consolidating-in-boston/article_79ee5128-6da4-11ec-9b77-f7daba599974.html)
With all due respect to the losses suffered under this dark Covid cloud, losing this fish market has been a jarring hit to this family’s life, and I keep meeting people across Cape Ann who feel the same, that Steve Connolly’s closed doors hurt. A lot.
The sadness here has forced me to ask - with all the loss around us - why does losing this fish market matter so much?
Our Glouceseter store always offered fresh high-quality seafood - fish that sparkled within the mounded ice. And the Steve Connolly service quietly made you feel after each purchase that you hit the fish jackpot. Never, ever once did Maria not chop off the thin tail end of the haddock fillet I had selected, leaving me only a thick, white steak, easy to cook because it was all the same thickness. She tossed that discarded end into the bin labeled “Chowder Fish, $4.95 per pound,” the best fish deal maybe anywhere.
Small, brunette, her face a perfect oval communicating calm, Maria looked like the Mona Lisa, including that elusive, measured smile which she reserved for only the most acutely surprising seconds in fish market life. In fact, I have seen that smile gently rise up into one cheek only a couple of times, and I cannot remember what inspired it.
And then there was the ice bin outside the door, including a neat stash of plastic bags and a plastic scoop. Departing customers could add a bag of ice to their fish purchase, keeping it chilled for its route from market to home refrigerator. This kindness always seemed much larger than the sum of its parts.
We’ve seen our favorite restaurants struggle, their doors fluttering from open to closed and back again, but Steve Connolly’s Fish Market had stayed open. We couldn’t order the wood-fired special at Short & Main, but we could consistently step up to the case of gleaming cod and swordfish and take home something that would be a great meal. On holidays we could still count on fish feasts of oysters, clams, and lobster at home.
Cracks in this system began to show when Steve Connolly’s had no soft shell crabs last spring. Apparently, the Steve Connolly retail market was really a small tributary from their wholesale business that supplied area restaurants with local fish. If the restaurants weren’t open and ordering soft shell crabs, the retail market wouldn’t have them. Then, Steve Connolly started closing on Wednesdays.
Nothing we did before Covid will be the same, including seeing Maria at least twice a week standing solemn and solid behind a case of North Atlantic seafood. We didn’t know it, but Steve Connolly’s was much more to us than a fish market. Apparently we should never take for granted anything helpful, easy, pleasant that we did regularly with reliably excellent results.
We wish everyone who worked there the best.
Honoring Steve Connolly’s excellent fresh fish, I offer a really good monkfish recipe, adapted from a recipe in the New York Times. They adapted it from Nobu Matsuhisa of the famous Nobu restaurant chain. Neither used monkfish in their recipes but I think its white firmness works beautifully.
Monkfish
Ingredients
¼ cup mirin
¼ cup sake
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons sesame oil (preferably dark)
2 pounds monkfish or any firm white fillets
Scallions
Optional sauce
2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
Red pepper flakes to taste
Juice of one lime.
Water (taste this and if it’s too strong dilute with a little water.)
Instructions:
In a very small saucepan mix together the mirin and sake. Bring to a boil for 20 seconds. Then lower the heat to low, and add the miso and sugar, whisking. Cook over medium heat until sugar is dissolved, about 4 minutes. Remove from heat, and whisk in the sesame oil. Let cool. Then pour mixture into a glass pie plate or baking dish large enough to hold the fish.
Rinse and pat dry the monkfish. Turn it into the marinade in the glass dish, and push it around so that all sides of the fish has been rubbed with the marinade. Cover with saran wrap, and return to the refrigerator. This can be marinated for anywhere from 2-3 hours or a full 24 hours. I did 24 hours, and the monkfish held up beautifully in the marinade.
When you are ready to cook the fish, preheat oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit. (I roasted broccoli in that oven first, adding the fish for the last 10 minutes of roasting broccoli.) Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil Remove the fish from the marinade and lay in a row across the baking sheet. Cook on the top rack of your oven oven for 10 minutes. Then turn the broiler on.
Broil monkfish until it is beginning to blacken and the marinade get bubbly on the top. It won’t be beautiful, but it’s appealing.
Remove from the oven, and put fillets on a cutting board. Slice them into 2” chunks, so that you can see the beautiful pure white centers rimmed with the blackened tops.
Serve over hot rice. Sprinkle with scallions, and drizzle with optional sauce, if you like.
Instructions for optional sauce:
Put all ingredients except the lime and water in a sauce pan, and simmer for a few minutes or until the sugar dissolves. Add lime juice and water if it is too strong. Serve as is.
