Category Archives: The writing life

Yashim’s Kitchen – stuffed mackerel

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With some trepidation I prepared this rather spectacular dish in front of sixty people at a literary festival one Summer. It was a complete triumph, as you can see from my expression in the photo.

 Yashim cooks this, too, in An Evil Eye.

Ingredients:

A large fresh mackerel, not gutted

Olive oil

For the stuffing: A few shallots, scoop of pine nuts, scoop of chopped blanched almonds, scoop of chopped walnuts, a handful of currants soaked in warm water, a few dried apricots finely chopped, and some herbs and spices – generous pinches of cinnamon, allspice, ground cloves, kirmiz biber or chilli powder, sugar and dill and parsley, finely chopped.

Cooking is easy – it’s getting there that’s the challenge. You have to make a small incision beneath the gills, and then draw out the guts, and chuck them away. Lay the mackerel on a board and beat it with a rolling pin, or an empty bottle, making sure you’ve snapped the backbone. Massage the skin gently, to loosen it from the flesh and finally – this is the bit that makes your audience, if you have one, groan out loud – squeeze the whole thing out through the incision below the gills!

It is not easy. Go gently, trying not to tear the skin, as if you were squeezing a tube of toothpaste. You are left with an empty skin, still attached to the head. Rinse it out, making sure to remove any little bones, and set it aside.

Now make the stuffing: sweat the chopped shallots in oil, add all the nuts, and let them colour. Add all the other ingredients except the herbs, and stir them around.

Pick out as much of the flesh as you can from the bones, and mix it into the stuffing, with herbs, a squeeze of lemon, and salt and pepper to taste.

Cook it through for another couple of minutes. Let it cool a bit, and stuff that mackerel! Use a teaspoon, and gradually fill the skin, squeezing the stuffing right down to the end. It looks like a mackerel again.

You can roll the fish in flour and fry it, or better still brush with oil and set it under the grill, hot, until the skin begins to blister.

Finally, with a very sharp knife, slice the mackerel thickly, lay it on a plate like a fish, and serve with lemon wedges.

getting out a bit more

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Back from a glorious morning at the Guildford Book Festival – glorious, not least, for dragging me out into the dawn in Dorset, and the mist curving over the hils as the sun rose red. After a frustrating week of plotting – a film treatment, of all things – it was good fun to arrive at the Electric Theatre and find myself amongst friends old and new, readers, writers – and Tim O’Kelly, who runs the One Tree Bookshop in Petersfield. Tim’s shop is what all book shops should be, and the Guardian have just said so here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/01/day-in-life-independent-bookshop

The event was a ‘Reader’s Day’, which meant a medley of small and large events with various authors including Elizabeth Speller, Mark Mills, Suzannah Dunn, S.J. Parris (aka Stephania Merritt) and Imogen Robertson, for whom I feel an avuncular affection, having given her a well-deserved good review in the New York Times for her first book, Instruments of Darkness. A great deal of laughter, some very interesting book chat, and – as ever – three cheers for the librarians of Surrey, who turned out as volunteers to make sure we got to the sandwiches.

Coming home I listened to Katie Fforde enthusing about Georgette Heyer; she was, apparently, extremely rude about all her millions of fans. Perhaps she should have gone to the Electric?

Writing – or idling?

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This morning, after the usual flurry of sending the children off to school, I found myself still in pyjamas and so I got back into bed, to read a bit, and maybe think.

Kate, just about to do a school run herself, didn’t think it looked much like work. Her whole attitude bristled with suspicion. Which raises the question of what, exactly, writing does look like.

I suppose St Jerome is the proper model.

But later, perched Jerome-like in front of my screen, I happened to come across this lovely literary blog, with a review of Lords of the Horizons, at http://tinylibrary.blogspot.com/2011/02/lords-of-horizons-by-jason-goodwin.html

To the casual observer, I was by then at work, like our saint here. But actually I was just messing about.

Housekeeping and apologies

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Shortly before the British launch of An Evil Eye, a greedy web-hosting company in Melbourne made off with my website. Largely on principle (and partly because they asked for money, and I’d lost all my original set-up passwords, user names and such), I have walked away from it, with my nose in the air.

I’m about to start another at www.jasongoodwin.info. My children assure me that the dot-info tag is very low, but there’s someone else who has .com and frankly, .info describes exactly what I want. Plus it’s delightfully cheap.

Meantime, apologies to anyone searching elsewhere on the web. Come back later!

I’ve had some great feedback for An Evil Eye already, both in the States and in the UK, and I was chuffed that the Christian Science Monitor chose The Janissary Tree and its sequels as one of its favourite foreign detective series…

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2011/0701/Top-7-detective-series-set-in-foreign-locales/Yashim-the-Eunuch-series-by-Jason-Goodwin

And here is Marco Ventura’s delicious cover, for Faber in the UK.

An Evil Eye Reviews

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From the Globe and Mail:

An Evil Eye

By Jason Goodwin, FSG, 304 pages, $29.95

The fourth novel in the marvellous Investigator Yashim series is the best of a great bunch. Goodwin’s grand evocation of the glories of the Ottoman Empire takes us into the heart of Istanbul in 1839. Admiral Fevzi Ahmet, Yashim’s old leader and mentor, has defected to the Egyptians. Why would one of the Sultan’s most honoured men show him such disrespect? The Sultan wants Yashim to investigate, but the search leads Yashim to the closed world of the Sultan’s harem, where it appears the secret of the Admiral’s betrayal lies. A great addition to a superb series with an unforgettable investigator.

And from the Literary Review:
‘It’s always a pleasure to visit Istanbul in the 1840s with Jason Goodwin and his sensitive, civilised detective Yashim … Both interesting and highly entertaining.’

CWA suspense – Dagger in the Library Nomination

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Having rather diffidently gone online to check on the Daggers – phew! I’m in, along with five other devious and crafty crime-writers: SJ Bolton (Bantam Press, Transworld), RJ Ellory (Orion), Mo Hayder (Bantam Press, Transworld), Susan Hill (Vintage), and Philip Kerr (Quercus). Great company.

The Daggers are Britains’s own awards for crime writing, in various categories; what’s lovely about the Library Dagger is that it’s awarded by librarians and library users, and not just not for a single book but for all the books we’ve written.  Libraries are facing hard times as the other, duller ‘books’ get balanced, and local authorities look to make cuts in their budget. Protest is the only option: I am warmed to incadescant rage by the erection of new traffic lights in my local town, replacing a perfectly good zebra crossing, at a cost of millions (it’s construction, folks!) while local village libraries are closed. I suspect that transport departments build empires for themselves, and find pointless work to do, while libraries costing next to nothing are scotched.

Libraries are church. They are coffee morning, afternoon tea. They are beacons, they are surprising. They succeed because they are always there. They feed children with ideas, they provide mothers with respite, they comfort and counsel the elderly. They are radical and unfazed. The people who work in them – and I only recently addressed a feisty bunch, the ALA, in America – are smart and funny and paid for library work, not for being the counsellors or teachers that they are. They are the largest of the Little Platoons Burke spoke about, when he atomized civic life two – three – centuries ago.

Lending a book doesn’t create work in County Hall. It creates minds. It creates the synapses of society, any society worth inhabiting.

Hurrah for the Daggers! But all halloos for the libraries!