Indian Accent serves it, Blue Ginger in Bangalore features it among its signature dishes, and every upscale Thai or Vietnamese restaurant seems to have basa on the menu, replacing sole, bhekti and singara fillets. But the story behind basa, perhaps 2010’s fish of the year, is a long and complex one. There aren’t too many catfish that can claim responsibility for a second US-Vietnam conflict.
My first taste of basa came in Thailand, at one of Bangkok’s legendary food malls. The flesh — bland enough to be an excellent vehicle for sauces and spices, but sweet enough to provide a contrapuntal note — brought back childhood memories. (In certain Bengali homes, it was, and probably still is, standard practice to buy live catfish from the market by the tubful. The fish would swim around until the cook’s guillotine fell, delivering a relatively painless death in our pursuit of the freshest possible catfish curry for lunch.)
There’s a reason chefs like basa. It lacks the boniness of hilsa, the fishiness of pabda and other strong-flavoured fish, and it is far less bland than sole or even bhekti. Sole and bhekti, to my mind, are the chicken of fish dishes — intrinsically uninteresting, but great vehicles for subtle sauces. Basa has a subtle flavour all its own, interesting texture — catfish can flex its muscles, though purists sometimes complain that it’s too thin-flavoured and watery. But by and large, basa is cheap, good fish — a classic “recession” fish for chefs.
In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck reports on the catfish: “About the first thing we done was to bait one of the big hooks with a skinned rabbit and set it and catch a cat-fish that was as big as a man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed over two hundred pounds. We couldn’t handle him, of course; he would a flung us into Illinois. We just set there and watched him rip and tear around till he drownded. We found a brass button in his stomach, and a round ball, and lots of rubbage. … They peddle out such a fish as that by the pound in the market house there; everybody buys some of him; his meat’s as white as snow and makes a good fry.”
That’s one of the reasons why some diners are squeamish about catfish: They’ll eat anything, from brass buttons to “rubbage”. They are dredgers, especially in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where catfish farmers found themselves tangled in a trade war with the US over the last decade. In 2002 and 2003, the US banned Vietnam farmers from calling their fish “catfish”, in an attempt to slow imports of basa; and there were unsubstantiated scare reports about the inferior quality of the fish.
Why is basa pouring into the Indian market? Because of the after-effects of the Catfish War. Spurred by reports that Vietnamese catfish were being overfarmed — a very real danger — the World Wildlife Fund for Nature recently advised consumers not to buy basa. The WWF’s Red List is influential, especially in Europe, and could hurt exports of basa or panga — and US catfish farmers are still waging war against Vietnamese “cobbler”, as it’s widely known in the States.
Vietnam is proud of its basa, though, and Vietnamese fish farmers are fighting back. The WWF fears that current basa farming practices are environmentally unfriendly, a charge that Vietnam has not yet been able to answer effectively. On the safety of basa, though, your platter should be relatively risk-free; it still remains among the healthier fish you can eat.
The real issue for Indian consumers is the issue that crops up with many varieties of farmed fish — depending on where your restaurant is sourcing from, the taste of basa can vary from complex (if the fish comes from the certified farms approved by the Vietnam fisheries council) or bland and boring (if the fish comes from farms that practice overfishing or use too many chemicals in the fish feed). Bland basa is instantly recognisable — it combines a cottony texture with a watery feel, and sourcing inferior basa is the kind of culinary misdemeanour that puts consumers off fish in general. Ask your restaurant where they get their basa from, and if the answer is reassuring, go ahead and tuck into your Basa Yellow Kari. If not, order the lamb.
[Nilanjana S Roy is a freelance writer]
