The Milkfish Country

Hakodate may have the Squid Dance, but Tainan has the Milkfish Palace.

As I made my way downstairs from the (entirely in Chinese, but sufficiently picture-adorned to be amusing) museum display about the history, lore, and usage of the milkfish, the girls manning the milkfish-snack-sampling stands all started elbowing each other to see who was going to have to go try and speak English to the foreigner while handing her a seaweed and milkfish cookie.

The winner(/loser?) approached me with her cookie on a stick and said enthusiastically, “It’s a cookie made from milkfish!”

“I ate milkfish this morning,” I told her as I took the cookie (which was very strange – much stranger than the shrimp cookies on offer everywhere else). And I had. I ate something called ‘Milkfish Skin Soup’ from a standon a street just outside the Anping District which has been serving this soup as breakfast for years. The skin curls in the bowl like shavings from the skin of a very large vegetable, shiny like an onion but spiraled like a snail. Enough meat is left on that it retains the chew of a salmon, and the flavor of a salmon-mackerel hybrid. The broth is almost clear, but the bottom is littered with reedy ginger stalks, making the last few bites spicy.

I also had milkfish at a much fancier place on YongKang street in Taipei a little over a week ago as part of a feast that included a mysterious curly-leafed cabbage and an omelet that looked like a pot pie. This milkfish was pared to the belly, laid flat, and fried, accompanied only by lemon and white pepper. The wide stripe of fat running between the halves served as a decadent dipping sauce for the meat. Much richer than butter, it was inedible alone, kind of like a savory coconut cream.

As obsessed as Taiwan is with the milkfish – and it is, as you can’t turn around without seeing a milkfish body part on a menu – apparently it is the Philippine’s national fish, so that’s one country I can’t skip!