Add one of these heavy metal nuggets to your cooking water to suffuse the liquid with enough iron to stave off anaemia – and you can help the world’s poor at the same time
The Lucky Iron Fish (£29.95, Wellcome Collection) is an electrolytic ingot. Transfers minerals to surrounding liquid via boiling.
Had all the irony you can stomach? Think again.
Lucky Iron Fish sounds like an excellent example of one of my favourite things: eccentrically translated Chinese restaurant menu items. (Public Explosion Chicken, Double Happiness Dragon Profit and Cubed Fred, you will all live for ever.) But this item is a much stranger fish, being literally what it says: an iron fish. Is it lucky? Potentially. It’s designed to prevent anaemia, by upping the level of iron in your diet. Iron deficiency affects more than 30% of the world’s population, and is also “commonly seen in athletes, women and vegetarians”, the box tells me. Symptoms include “brittle hair, pale skin and concentration issues”, which sounds like every girl I was in love with during the 90s. The idea is to boil the heavy metal fish – who we may as well call Ozzy Ozbream – in a litre of water with a few drops of lemon juice or other source of acidity, fish him out (he will get hot and heavy, so watch yourself) and cook with the iron-fortified water.
I boil a batch, releasing Ozzy into the water carefully, trying not to worry about the non-stick coating on my pan. After 10 minutes, the liquid has taken the taint of a healthy urine sample, with a ferrous, mineral top note. Some would say it tastes like industrial run-off. But the taste is agreeable in miso soup, and unnoticeable in large batch cooking such as stew.
It feels extremely lucky to be eating a sausage cassoulet while delivering anaemia a dry slap, and its virtues don’t end there. When you buy a Lucky Iron Fish, another is distributed to a community in need, which should make your heart swell with cheer, although they haven’t specified which community (it better not be the athletes). I find it quite mad that we can get more iron in our diet simply by boiling up a hunk of metal and eating the leftover water. A bit Mad Max. Still, who am I to look a gift fish in the mouth? It may be below sea level for effort, but it gets an A for achievement.
Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day? Rubbish – it lasts five years. (Hope he likes boiled fish, though.)
Big dish, little fish, cardboard box. 4/5
