Triglie alla Livornese

The dish is Sephardic in origin, brought to Livorno by the Jews of the Spanish and Portuguese diaspora who settled in the free port under the Livornine laws of the later sixteenth century. It began as triglie alla mosaica — mullet cooked 'in the manner of Moses', a recipe of the Roman ghetto — and in Livorno shed its raisins and pine nuts and traded vinegar for white wine, becoming the leaner tomato version known today; chronicles place its birth in the second half of the 1500s. The gastronome Pellegrino Artusi fixed the name 'alla livornese' in his 1891 kitchen bible. Some scholars caution that the tomato-and-fish style may have been the port city's own, adopted by its Jews rather than invented by them, but the dish remains a touchstone of Livorno's Jewish culinary heritage.

The mullet is sweet and delicate, its flesh firm yet yielding, with the faint distinctive savour prized in rock mullet. A light fry keeps the surface just firm, and the fresh tomato sauce — clean, garlicky, a little acidic — sets off the fish without smothering it. Eaten straight from the pan with bread for the sauce, it is a plate that tastes of the sea and summer.

Red mullet has fine, fragile muscle that falls apart easily, so the light flouring and quick fry matter: the coating and a brief contact with hot oil set the surface proteins and form a thin crust, holding each fish together for the braise and lightly thickening the sauce as the flour disperses. From there the cooking is deliberately gentle, a bare simmer with no stirring, because the delicate myofibril proteins contract above about 60°C and toughen or break if boiled or handled hard. The tomato sauce is only lightly reduced, concentrating its sugars and glutamate, which meets the sweet mullet in a clean savoury balance; the tomato's acidity and the raw oil added at the end keep the whole dish bright rather than heavy.