Garfish

It's a garfish, my horn fish from the last post... Belone belone. They migrate through Danish waters to spawn from the end of April until June. Locally they're caught in the Sound (between Denmark and Sweden), and a popular sport fishing spot for garfish is in front of Kronborg, 'Hamlet's castle' in Helsingør.

The bones of this long-nosed fish are bright turquoise green, which make them relatively easy to see and remove before eating. Not easy enough, though, to entirely dispense with my mom's fishbone catching rule nr. 1: chew the fish in the front of your mouth first.

The season's first... uhh... horn fish?

Finding the English word for hornfisk is only one of the challenges of this bilingual blogging. Writing about Swapan's curry was easy - we speak English together. It's something else rewriting my Danish post on horn fish and the glories of spring in English. I think I immerse myself in the world of the language that I'm speaking. Switching requires extracting myself from a whole context and stepping into another. That cross-over fascinates me, though, so I'm in for the investigation.

The fish? Cleaned and gutted, head and tail removed. Cut into four pieces, rolled in whole spelt flour and fried in some cold-pressed safflower oil for 3-4 minutes on each side. Eaten with steamed green beans and boiled tiny new potatoes - nice, firm, sweet ones from France, as the Danish news are still exorbitant. The rhubarb in the garden is still too small to pick, or I'd have had some, sweet-pickled, with the fish, too.

And spring? Hornfisk is a local harbinger of spring. And you can't get into or out of the house without going by the big, blooming white lilac bush in the driveway - the smell of spring itself.

dansk