Octopus
Octopuses have long been the subject of horror stories: huge arms – erroneously called tentacles - emerge from the waves, wind round beleaguered ships or unfortunate mariners, and drag them down into the dark depths of the ocean. Giant squid suffer a similar fate. In Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – the 20,000 leagues, incidentally, being a reference to the distance travelled beneath the ocean’s surface, and not to the depth – a school of giant squid attack the vessel and are desperately fought off by the crew. The many-armed creature of the deep has been around as a scare-story for thousands of years. The monstrous creature Scylla in the ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey has twelve arms and six heads, and lives in a sea cave. Her arms reach out, twirling and grabbing anything within their reach. More recently, a giant octopus almost spelt the end of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.
The Mediterranean octopus makes a good meal, though, and is not threatening at all. When buying one, unless you are lucky enough to have a diver in the family who can spear one for you, make sure that it looks moist and fresh. The arms should be relatively short and thick. Small octopuses are most tender - but you should be all right with anything up to two kilos. If in doubt, freeze your fresh octopus for a couple of days, as this will break down the fibres and make it tender.
All octopus need to be simmered for a fair amount of time to be tender. Those up to 500g will need 30-45 minutes. If your octopus is about one kilo, give it a good hour. Anything larger should take 90 minutes at least. Always check the meat after 45 minutes of cooking, as over-cooking has the reverse effect of making it tougher. Some cooks, including me, pop the cork of a wine-bottle into the pot along with the octopus, as it seems to make it more tender. It might be our imagination, but it does seem to make a difference.
An octopus is killed by turning its head inside out. Then the beak, eyes and interior organs are removed. This is the advantage of buying yours at a fishmonger’s – you can get this part of the job done there. The meat is then beaten with a mallet to break the fibres, if you have no time to freeze it instead, which serves the same purpose.
Octopus, like squid and snails, is the sort of dish that you should never surprise guests with. It provokes strong feelings of revulsion in some people, and it would be inconsiderate to serve it unless you know for certain that it is.
Octopus meat is a useful source of vitamins B3 and B12, potassium, phosphorus and selenium.The octopus is a mollusc
The octopus belongs to a group of molluscs called the cephalopods. The word ‘cephalopod’ translates roughly as ‘head-footed’, and comes from the fact that their arms (or legs, if you prefer) appear to come directly from their heads. Octopuses have eight of these arms – they are not tentacles. Other cephalopods, including squid and cuttlefish, have 10 arms. The nautilus has even more. The arms of the octopus usually bear suction-cups. Unlike most other cephalopods, the majority of octopuses have almost entirely soft bodies with no internal skeleton. They have neither a protective outer shell like the nautilus, or any vestige of an internal shell or bones, like cuttlefish or squids. A beak, similar in shape to a parrot’s beak, is the only hard part of their body. This softness enables them to squeeze through very narrow spaces between underwater rocks, which helps them when they are fleeing predators. Octopuses have a relatively short lifespan, and some species live for as little as six months. Larger species, such as the North Pacific giant octopus, may live up to five years. Reproduction in all octopuses is cause of death. Males can live for only a short while after mating, and females die soon after their eggs hatch. After mating, the female chooses a nesting-den, lays her eggs, and for the next six months (in the case of giant octopuses), she tends to them and protects them from predators, never leaving her nest to feed. By the time the eggs hatch, she is severely emaciated and dies. The newborn young then fend for themselves alone.
About the word ‘octopus’
‘Octopus’ is the ancient Greek pronunciation for ‘eight legs’. The ancient Greek plural is pronounced ‘octopodes’, but because the word has now been Anglicised, the correct plural takes the form used in English for singular nouns ending in ‘us’: octopuses. The plural form ‘octopi’ is incorrect, though it is sometimes used and is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as an infrequent alternative to ‘octopuses’. ‘Octopi’ derives from the mistaken notion that ‘octopus’ is a second-declension Latin noun, which it is not. If the word were Latin, it would be ‘octopes’ (eight-foot), and the plural would then be ‘octopedes’, analogous to centipedes (a hundred feet) and millipedes (a thousand feet). The Latin plural of ‘pes’ (foot) is ‘pedes’. Fowler’s Modern English Usage gives ‘octopuses’ as the only acceptable plural in English.
A close encounter with an octopus
“It was February, and 17m below the water’s surface daylight had been muted to twilight. Looking towards the surface, I could see my Zodiac riding at anchor, an extra camera hanging on its line. Swimming along a series of ledges and crevices, I was taking photographs, when I felt something brush against my shoulder. Preoccupied by the image before the camera, I dismissed the sensation as a piece of kelp riding in the current, or perhaps a fellow-diver pulling a ‘sea monster’ gag. I continued shooting, my vision never leaving the viewfinder. Then I felt it again – this time a stronger tug on my head and shoulder. Turning, I found myself face to face with a real sea monster – an octopus almost two metres across. On arm grasped my head and another, my shoulder. I had come to the cold waters of British Columbia, Canada, in search of the giant octopus. Now, it had found me. While I had been clearing my mask, the octopus had begun to drag the strobe, still attached to the camera, and a second strobe, towards a cave at the base of the ledge. For more than five minutes we grappled. The octopus was so strong that I couldn’t pull the strobe free using force alone. Only by repeatedly dislodging one arm and then the other was I finally able to break the octopus’s hold and regain possession of my camera and strobes. Thwarted, the monster retreated into its cave and glared out at me.”-Fred Bavendam/Diver Magazine
Victor Hugo and the giant octopus
In the mid-19th century, Victor Hugo, the celebrated author of Les Miserables, published Les Travailleurs de la Mer (The Toilers of the Sea). One of the highlights of that book is a fight to the death between Hugo’s hero, Gilliatt, and an immense octopus, in a sea cave near the Channel Islands, off the coast of England. “What can be more horrible,”
Hugo wrote, “than to be clasped by those vicious thongs which adhere closely to the body by virtue of their many sharp points? Each of these points is an eternity of terrible, indescribable pain. It is as though one were being eaten alive by a hundred mouths, each of them too small. But the wound of these points is as nothing to that of the sucker discs. The points are the beast entering into your flesh. The discs are you, entering into the flesh of the monster.”
Hugo’s colourful narrative made the octopus the talk of Paris for a time. Newspapers took up the controversy, debating the dangers of this ‘devil-fish’, as it was called. Restaurants featured octopus in sauce. Milliners created an octopus hat for ladies at the seaside. But Hugo’s description relied more on fiction than on fact. The Pacific giant octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) lives nowhere near the Channel Islands, which are in the Atlantic Ocean. It lives half a world away, inhabiting different parts of the northern Pacific Ocean: California to southern Alaska, northern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Japan. The generally accepted record for this creature was an octopus that weighed 272kg, with an arm-span of 9.6m. Most giant octopuses, however, are much smaller than that.