Doin’ That Squid Jig

It’s a cold night on the Seattle waterfront, and the squid bite is on.

By Langdon Cook

SEATTLE IS A SAD, wet place in the depths of winter, and sometimes, this time of year, I head downtown looking for a little nightlife. Tonight I drive past the Space Needle and the bars and nightclubs of Belltown, past the row of shiny new biotech buildings on the waterfront, and park at the foot of the old grain terminal. Next door is the public fishing pier. The Happy Hooker bait shop is shuttering for the night, but the crowd on the pier has a high-powered halogen spotlight hooked up to a car battery and everyone is on their feet, pressed up against the railing and gibbering in a dozen different languages. Anticipation is thick. There’s a shout at the far end of the pier, then cheering as tentacled beasts come flying out of the water, squirting water and ink. The squid bite is on.

I’d been thinking about squid lately because there’s an Italian dish I’d heard about that was supposed to be a Christmas specialty in Venice, a dish with cuttlefish, which is a close relative of the squid. It seemed so over the top to me, and I just had to try it. In Italy they call it risotto nero con seppie—black risotto with cuttlefish. Black because of the ink. There aren’t too many jet black foods out there, certainly not as a main course.

I didn’t buy into the theory that the squid was trying to mate with my jig. It was a voracious predator, no doubt about it.

I resolved to learn the secrets of risotto and told my wife Marty I was determined to make a feast that would impress even her relatives in the old country. Not that I would be seeing any of these relatives. They live in Italy, in the shadow of Vesuvius. But I liked to think we would go over there one day, maybe even for good. I liked to imagine the day we met Martha’s relatives, how we would visit the cemetery where her people were laid to rest, and then, after stumbling through ancient ruins and meeting one person after another in town with the same last name, Silano—Martha’s name—we would return to the family casa. In my fantasy I needed to be prepared. They would be welcoming in the Italian tradition. I would offer to help in the kitchen. “You cook?” “Sì.” Well, sort of.

More squid plopping into buckets woke me from my impossible reverie. I was missing the bite. But before I could occupy an open slot along the rail, a tiny Cambodian woman, her face a welter of wrinkles, beat me to it. She looked up at me with an enigmatic smile before turning her attention back to the water below. “Gotta be quick, bro,” someone called out down the line. He stepped aside to give me a little room, and again, before I could claim the spot, the same woman snuck in like a California parker, this time letting loose a string of what I took to be sarcastic Khmer invective. My would-be ally on the rail snickered.

“She’s going for the spotlight, bro.”

This essay and the accompanying recipe are excerpted from Langdon Cook’s new book Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager (Skipstone, 2009).