Mone de pescado

As tradition built it

Mone de pescado

Serves 6. About 55 minutes.

Ingredients

The fish

• 6 (180g each) robalo (sea bass) fillets
• to taste salt
• 1½ tsp garlic, finely chopped

The parcels

• 6 pieces, 25 by 18cm foil
• 6 pieces, 25 by 18cm banana leaf, toasted
• 12 hoja santa leaves
• 2 plátanos machos, sliced and fried
• 3 medium tomatoes, in wedges
• ½ white onion, in strips, sautéed
• 120ml chile dulce or green pepper, in strips, sautéed
• 2 chiles xcatic or güeros, seeded, in strips
• 18 leaves cilantro
• 6 tbsp lard or olive oil

Method

1. Season the fillets with salt, spread them with the garlic and let them rest.
2. Lay a piece of banana leaf on each piece of foil and two hoja santa leaves on the banana leaf. Put fried plantain, tomato and a little salt in the middle.
3. Set a fillet on top, with onion, chile dulce, xcatic and cilantro. Salt again and add a tablespoon of lard to each.
4. Close the banana leaf over it like a tamal and wrap the foil round to hold it.
5. Steam 35 minutes, until the fish is cooked but not falling apart. Take off the foil and serve.

Notes

The word's own etymology, offered by some as deriving from monear, to tie, in the way sugarcane tips were once bundled against frost, is a plausible folk etymology.

The recipe is Larousse Cocina's moné de robalo. Lupita Vidal, the Tabascan chef of La Cevichería in Villahermosa, uses one 120g fillet a parcel with raw green plantain, parsley, olive oil and no chiles, and steams it 25 to 35 minutes over water that must not bubble, so the fish sweats and does not dry. Neither recipe cooks the parcel over coals.

What a modern chef changes

Brined fish, Egg-sealed steam

Rung 05

Method

1. Cure the fish briefly in a light salt-and-lime brine before wrapping, for firmer flesh through the parcel's longer cook.
2. Cook the wrapped parcel on a Big Green Egg run indirect with the deflector in, genuinely closer to the enclosed, moisture-trapping mechanism of the traditional coal-roast than a domestic oven.
3. Where hoja santa cannot be sourced, wrap in banana leaf alone and accept the loss of the inner leaf's own aniseed character honestly, rather than reaching for an aggressive substitute like fresh tarragon that would misrepresent the flavour rather than merely thin it.