Waiting for Boquerones

Tiny red anchovies in a tin have about as much in common with fresh, white Boquerones as Kraft pimento cheese slices have with pimiento sandwiches. In other words: pretty much nothing.

There is something godlike in these fresh fish, which get marinated for a day or two, then served up a la chef Hugh Acheson with red grapefruit slices and spicy fresh jalapenos. It’s one of the best things that comes out of our soul food kitchen and also one of my absolute favorites, on many levels. There is however, a rub: The season for buying fresh boquerones off the docks in the Tel Aviv port lasts about two weeks. That’s it. You wait, you wait, you wait. You talk incessantly about how divine this dish is. And then you blink and you’ve missed it. Another year of waiting again. I’ve got a longish list of clients with strange, foreign names like Vladimir and Estragon who seem to be waiting an eternity for this dish. As well they might.

I think were the essayist and philosopher William James to update his seminal piece “The Moral Equivalent of War,” it would be (or should be) “The Moral Significance of Waiting.” This takes in so much of what we do in our soul-food kitchen: long marinades in adobo or buttermilk, or brines; slow-cooking processes, and yes, very long wait times to queue up for the chance to purchase something that only appears on the horizon a very short time each year. Someone in my family — it had to have been my mom — use to say “If it’s worth having, it’s worth waiting for.” In this immediate gratification world we live in, that concept seems perhaps so outdated. And yet. Wait for it . . .