Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Breaded Swordfish with Caper Celery Sauce and a Tomato Herb Salad

September is here, and my herbs are getting leggy, shooting up, searching for the warmth of the sun and finding it fading. Another growing season circles the drain. Sad. But I’ve still got lots of lovage and leaf celery. Those two are unstoppable. I don’t generally use a lot of either during the summer, just a hint in a dish, afraid that their strengths will overpower. But now I’m under the gun. Don’t want them to go to waste, and neither one dries well, so I’ve tried highlighting them here in two ways, first in a sort of chunky salsa verde, and then mixed into a little side salad, where I could also use up the handful of cherry tomatoes I still had hanging on the vines. I’m glad I did. The flavors were beautiful. Fall-like, deep but still fresh enough to evoke warm weather feelings.

Leaf celery is celery grown for its leaves, not for its stalks. Its stalks are spindly, its leaves abundant. They’re highly perfumed, but I’ve discovered that you can use a bit more without overkill. Not so with lovage, another celery-flavor herb but more like celery on overdrive. That stuff is rough trade. Two or three leaves in a pot of beans is all that pot can take. Raw in a sauce, the way I’ve used it here, you want to team it up with another strong taste, capers for instance, to balance out its power. In small doses it’s a lovely, truly savory herb. Too much and you’d rather be mopping your floor with it.

You’ll notice that I used ground-up taralli here. I didn’t have any other means of creating breadcrumbs unless I left the apartment, and I didn’t feel like doing that. They work well if you coat them in a bit of olive oil so they don’t get too dry.

Note: If you don’t have leaf celery, use the leaves from regular celery. They’ll taste good, too. If you don’t have lovage, well, maybe you’re lucky.

Breaded Swordfish with Caper Celery Sauce and a Tomato Herb Salad

(Serves 2)

For the caper celery sauce:

½ cup Sicilian salt-packed capers, soaked for about ½ hour and then rinsed and drained
¾ cup leaf celery leaves or regular celery leaves, lightly chopped
2 or 3 lovage leaves, lightly chopped
1 scallion, sliced into thin rounds, using all the tender green part
The juice and grated zest from 1 small lemon
About 4 tablespoons best-quality extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt

For the salad:

12 cherry tomatoes, cut in half
A handful of leaf celery leaves, lightly ripped
2 lovage leaves, ripped in half
1 garlic clove, smashed with the side of a knife
A drizzle of lemon juice
Salt
Black pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil

For the fish:

12 fennel-flavored taralli
¼ cup grated Grana Padano cheese
Salt
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 swordfish steaks (locally fished in the North Atlantic, if possible), about 1½ inches thick and about 6 to 7 ounces each, the skin removed
Black pepper

Put all the ingredients for the caper celery sauce in a small bowl, and give them a good mix. Let the sauce sit to develop flavor while you get on with the rest of the dish. For the salad, put the tomatoes and herbs in a bowl. Make a quick vinaigrette with the garlic, lemon juice, salt, black pepper, and some more of your good olive oil. Pour the vinaigrette over the tomatoes, and give them a quick toss. Remove the garlic.

Put the taralli in a food processor, and grind finely. Add the Grana Padano, a little salt, and a drizzle of olive oil, and pulse a few times until the mix looks a bit moist. Pour it out onto a plate.

Season the swordfish lightly with salt and black pepper, and then press it into the taralli crumbs, coating it well both top and bottom.

Set up a shallow-sided sauté pan, and pour in about ½ inch of olive oil. Let it get hot over medium-high heat. Add the swordfish steaks, and cook them without moving them around at all until they’re golden on one side, about 4 minutes or so. Give them a flip, and brown their other side, turning down the heat a little so they can cook through without too much darkening, about another 4 minutes, just until the fish is tender when poked with a knife. Swordfish dries out easily, so keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t overcook.

Plate the swordfish, spooning a good amount of the caper sauce on top. Arrange the tomato salad a little to the side. Serve right away.