A teacher went fishing with old local fishermen on his twenty-footer. They sailed of at dawn and before the sunrise they lowered the line with some hundred hooks. One hour later the teacher had to pull out the line under the direction of the fishermen. His back started to ache soon but he forgot it immediately when he landed first catch, a 6-pound dentex (zubatac). A few smaller fish followed and toward the end, another dentex, somewhat smaller than the previous one. Before they left home, teacher had just a cup of a marjoram “tea” and hard work made him already hungry. He started thinking about the early lunch (marenda) the moment he landed the first fish.
“Which one are we going to cook?”, he asked the old men, thinking of a great soup that could be made of a dentex. “The smaller one”, said the old men.
“Why the smaller?”, wondered the teacher. “That is the freshest one”, said the old men.
On the small boat there was just a small propane lamp and one pot. Not much ingredients besides few cloves of garlic, some parsley that old men pinched out of a pot on his terrace this morning, few peppercorns and a flask of olive oil. For salt they added some seawater to the pot. Still, teacher had the best fish ever.
“There are only two kinds of fish”, said the old men, “the fresh one and that other.”
And I nearly forgot this lesson.
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