Bismillahi Rahmani Raheem, assalamu alaikum
Recently I purchased from my local grocery store some Scottish Kippers, they came in a box but inside the box where two fish shrink wrapped and sealed, the fish where caught in the Atlantic ocean and half smoked, preserved and shipped across to the other side of the world and sold here.
They didn’t take much to prepare about 8 minutes in the oven and that was it, but surprisingly they were the best tasting fish I had ever had, it had the best sea salt taste to it and the abundance of fish oil was unlike anything I had ever seen or tasted, if I could I would present it to the Prophet Muhammad (saws) in Jannah who likes simple food like this.
Nothing in recent memory even came close, not even the much more expensive and fresh fish I had a week earlier, you can tell the quality of a meal when you are still tasting it a few days later like you just ate it.
But, I had had this experience before and it came in an even more surprising package, a can of smoked salmon, this was no ordinary can this brand had won awards for this product. After eying the can sceptically and wondering who would give an award to canned fish, granted it was more expensive to purchase, I could see nothing to tell me why until I opened it.
As soon as I opened the can it immediately perfumed the air with the most beautiful salmon smell I had ever witnessed, this is not an exaggeration I purchased fresh salmon and it didn’t smell this good, on top of that it tasted almost like fresh salmon that was smoked.
So what made these two products so successful, it was the fact they were both doing something old.
The Scottish kipper was prepared in an old way I remembered from my youth that preserved the fish in every respect and made it possible to ship it across the entire globe without losing quality, imagine if they did that with fish from other parts of the world people could be eating quality seafood from any part of the earth.
The canned salmon was preserved in the can similarly using a method I had seen in my youth, I remembered eating ordinary canned fish in Lebanon that tasted like this, today they are giving it awards.
Today we live in a world where everything good has already been destroyed so when we see something old this is the kind of contrast in experience we can expect from it because it was a better way of doing things.
Shaykh Rami Al Rifai.