SALMON DUMPLINGS IN CHICKPEA BROTH

Sturgeon makes only occasional appearances in the kitchen accounts of San Diego, the Zaragoza friary associated with Altamiras so he may have been thinking of Andalusian friary cooks when he gave various recipes for it.

By the eighteenth century the catches from Aragon’s Río Ebro, mainly in December, the high season, were few and far between. The damming of the Río Ebro had begun on the Catalan coastal plain in the 11th century and for seven hundred years sturgeon had been unable to reach spawning grounds upstream. But they still swam in the Ebro estuary where they were caught and sold at the largest nearby town, Tortosa, and when they did appear in Altamiras’s kitchen, however occasionally, he needed to come up with plenty of ways to cook the flesh from such a large fish.

Among Altamiras’s various dishes he offered grilled, poached or roasted hunks of sturgeon, sweet fishcakes and these little fishballs – almondiguillas – in chickpea broth. They are more like dumplings than the fishballs we know from oriental cuisines, soft and spongy when freshly made, as here, with organic salmon chopped by hand and a mild chickpea and fish stock . Altamiras suggests adding “a little chopped greenery” to the dumplings and I like to use fennel, with pinches of cinnamon and cloves added to the broth.

Diego Gallegos, chef at Sollo and a specialist in river fish cookery, came up with a wonderful reworked version of this recipe for the book: he makes larger fishballs rolled in a velvety pimentón coating, baked briefly and then simmered and served in a brandied chicken broth.

Vicky Hayward

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