High-quality fish has been frozen or continually iced from shortly after the catch until it reaches your hands. Your job is to keep its quality from the time you buy it, until you cook it. Most refridgerators hold a temperature of around 4 °C – not cold enough. In fact fish held at 0 °C keeps twice as well as that held at 5 °C. Fish held in a hot car – where temperatures are roughly equivalent to those of a low oven – can spoil in thirty minutes.

On a hot day you may even want to bring a cooler along for the ride and put the fish in there as soon as you come out of the store.

Keeping fish cold in the refridgerator is easy. You can fill the vegetable bin or a baking dish with ice and bury the still wrapped fish in there. Make sure fillets, especially are well wrapped (whole fish can be unwrapped or wrapped), and drain and replenish the ice once or twice a day. You may find it easier and just as effective to sandwich the fish between two or three icepacks and keep a half a dozen or so of these in the freezer all the time. Keep the fish well wrapped when using this technique – a couple layers of papel towels are sufficient – because ice packs are cold enough to freeze the surface of fish if they come in direct contact with it.

If fish is really fresh, you can freeze it. Act quickly, wrap it well in a couple of layers of plastic wrap, and put it in the coldest place you can find; the bottom of a chest or upright freezer turned to its coldest gives pretty good results. Freezing a good piece of fish at home and eating it two weeks later is preferable to keeping it refridgerated for five or six days before you get around to cooking it, and certainly preferable to letting it sit in the refridgerator until it goes bad.

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