French Provincial Cooking (66 page)

It was not, I think, until my first visit to the Mediterranean that I began to suspect that there might be better ways of eating fish than in these disguised fashions, and to appreciate the beauty of red mullet, bass or sardines brought straight from the sea to the grill and served crackling and golden with no garnish but a lemon. Since those days I have nearly always preferred grilled sole, trout, salmon, mullet, herring or mackerel to any subtle concoction of sole, lobster or turbot with cream, wine, or mushrooms.

So in the recipes in this fish chapter I have concentrated on rather simple dishes. Do not expect to find recipes for chefs’ concoctions of sole with sophisticated cream sauces and complicated garnishes. Such dishes are indeed often delectable, and they make fine backgrounds for the lovely white wines of Burgundy or the Loire but, because they entail last-minute finishing touches which can all too easily go wrong, but without which they would be incomplete and pointless, few of them are suitable for home cookery. Into the question of one or two famous regional fish dishes such as the
bouillabaisse,
the
brandade de morue
and the lobster
à l’américaine
I have gone in some detail, because these are dishes in which many people are interested in spite of the fact that they are unsuited to English domestic cookery.

On the whole, though, dishes which are very simple in execution are those which also best preserve the natural tastes of the fish and at the same time present well. In no branch of cookery, I think, is the presentation of more importance than where fish dishes are concerned. It is so easy to be put off by a ragged-looking fish steak, a herring broken in the grilling or a clumsily fried trout. And a garnish of brightly coloured vegetables does little to redeem matters. Even a beautiful, and beautifully cooked, salmon trout will fail to arouse interest if it comes to table with its head and tail lolling over the ends of the dish and a sea of cucumber surging all round it. As to the last point, I cannot help wondering how long it will be before the various associations for the promotion of fish cookery in this country turn their attention to the utter lack of dishes suitable to the service of large fish.

What we need are long, narrow dishes especially designed to hold a whole fish and its juices, and, preferably, these dishes should be in plain white china, which seems to me to make the best background for fish. If the dishes were fireproof so much the better, and they should be available in three different sizes. Such dishes (although they were not fireproof) used to be made by English china manufacturers. I have some, and very nice they are; but they are no longer made, and one must search the second-hand shops and the market stalls for them. In a country in which the fishing industry is of the greatest importance this is, to say the least, odd.

Fish suitable for grilling under modern gas and electric grills are mackerel, herring, red mullet, grey mullet, sea-bream and sea-bass provided they are not too large, trout, sole; and salmon, eel and white fish cut into steaks.

For whole fish cleaned and scaled, make two or three slantwise incisions on each side, so that in cooking the heat will penetrate without the skins bursting, paint the fish with olive oil, rub them with salt, add a sprinkling of fresh herbs if you like, and cook them close to the grill to start with, then farther away once the skin has become crisp. There should be no necessity to turn them over more than once, but they will need a little basting with more oil during the cooking. They are done when you can see that the flesh is white right down to the bone.

Sole for grilling should be skinned on both sides, and should be grilled rather more gently than the fat type of fish. To make them less liable to dry up during cooking, they can be marinated for 30 minutes to an hour in a little olive oil and lemon juice, and then lightly coated with breadcrumbs, in which case no incisions should be made in the flesh. How sole is grilled in the majority of restaurants remains something of a mystery. It appears to be first steamed, then popped under a grill for a moment. Not a very satisfactory procedure.

Fish steaks for grilling should be well coated with oil and not cooked too close to the heat or the outer surfaces will become charred and dry; to minimise the risk of breakage, they should be turned only once during the cooking.

The cookers with capacious eye-level grills, introduced in recent years, are a blessing to those who feel that grilling is the best way to cook fish, and who have hitherto been hampered by a grill large enough for only two small fish at a time. There are also any number of separate grilling units, gas and electric, which can be installed independently of the cooker proper, and in the past three or four years many people have rediscovered the merits of the primitive charcoal-burning grill. This, however, needs a properly ventilated kitchen, or at least a table standing by an open window, or you will be suffocated by the fumes. The technique of charcoal grilling also requires a certain amount of practice and skill as, for that matter, does any other form of grilling, but at least with gas and electricity it is mainly the food you have to attend to, not the fire as well. It is not quite enough to set down your steak or your fish on a wire grid over a charcoal fire and thereafter leave it to look after itself. Certain of the new London bistro type of restaurants are crowded with people drawn in by the magic words ‘charcoal grilling’ but, unfortunately, this too often proves to be just one more variation on the theme of good materials wrecked by the cook. Make no mistake, tending a charcoal fire is as much an art as cooking on it and those unpractised in this art will find that their food, so far from being deliciously scented with an elusive aroma of smoke, is partly burnt to a cinder and partly raw, abominably permeated with the taste of burnt fat into the bargain.

In all the wine-growing districts of France there still exists the method of grilling over vine cuttings and this, when well done, does truly give a uniquely aromatic flavour to the food so cooked. But it is not really a method one can import into one’s own kitchen, even were the vine cuttings available.

Under the names of
friture de la Loire, du Rhône, de Seine, du golfe, du lac
, or mixed fried river, sea, lake fish, etc., French restaurants serve a mixture of small fried fish quite often unidentifiable, the varieties depending upon what the day’s catch has brought forth. When it is a question of the
friture du golfe,
in other words local sea or rock fish, these can be, when very fresh, barely dusted with flour and crisply fried in olive oil, very delicious. They are served with a garnish of lemon, nothing else.

About the small freshwater fish from the rivers and lakes, I am not quite so sure; they can be very bony and rather tasteless.

Having mentioned olive oil I cannot help but repeat once more that for the deep frying of fish there is no other fat to compare with it. Nothing else makes it so crisp and crackling; and never, with olive oil, will you get that after-taste of stale fat which mars the best fried sole in even the most expensive of our restaurants. For this reason, you will nearly always find that an Italian, a Jewish or a Provençal cook will serve you with beautifully fried fish, because, traditionally, these people all use olive oil for their frying.

As already explained on page 74, groundnut oil is a cheap and fair substitute for olive oil. Whichever you are using see that it is completely free of any sediment from previous frying. Heat it until it gives off the faintest blue haze. The proper deep-frying temperature is 356 deg. F., but you can test it by dropping in a little cube of bread. It should fry golden in barely one minute.

I am always rather surprised when I read in books and articles that to cook fish
à la meunière
is one of the simplest of achievements. Simple in conception certainly; but in execution, no. This is a confusion of two distinct aspects of cookery into which it is very easy to fall. As we all know, there is a big difference between theory and practice, and the theory of a
sole meunière
is that the fish, fried in butter, is transferred to a serving dish and over it is poured a quantity of
freshly cooked
, hissing, foaming butter. A squeeze of lemon juice, a scrap of parsley, and the dish is ready. But do they think to tell you, the instructors of the nothing-is-simpler school, that the butter in which you fry your sole must be
clarified
butter, that you must watch your fish like a hawk to see that it does not stick and burn, that to turn it without breaking it is a tricky business, that you should discard the remains of the butter in which your fish was cooked, and that you must start again with a clean pan and a quantity of
fresh
butter, not
clarified
, and that this butter must be brought just exactly to the right point when it turns a pale hazel-nut colour, no more and no less, that it must be poured instantly over the waiting fish which must with equal immediacy be set in front of those who are to eat it? Do they even tell you, the optimists who have seen the dish being cooked without doing it themselves, or the professionals who have special pans at their disposal, that in the ordinary 10-inch frying-pan to be found in most households there will not be room to cook more than one not very large sole?

Few small households possess the large oval pans especially designed for the shallow frying of fish, and one must be realistic about this point. What is the use of instructing the housewife to cook
sole
meunière
for six, or even four people, in one small pan? By the time the second and third batches have been cooked, the first will be cold and sodden. In a restaurant or hotel the cooks can perhaps get away with this sort of thing —they are not paying for spoiled materials. The housewife with a critical family, or guests accustomed to good cooking, cannot take the risk of wasting fine quality and expensive ingredients. So, unless your kitchen is supplied with a suitable pan, it is best not to try to cook
sole meunière
or similar dishes for more than two people.

Colin is the French fishmonger’s name for hake, which, when salted and dried, becomes
merluche. Colin à l’oseille
used to be a common Friday dish in French restaurants but one rarely comes across it nowadays. This may be because people have come to appreciate the excellence of fresh hake and it no longer comes into the category of cheap fish, either in France or England.

Hake can be poached or baked or fried, but is at its best cut into steaks, grilled, and served with a rather highly flavoured sauce such as
rémoulade
(pages 122 and 123) or, if you like a more delicate sauce, an
hollandaise
(page 119).

Steaks weighing about 6 oz. each are generously coated with olive oil and seasoned with a little lemon juice, salt and pepper. They take 12 to 15 minutes to grill, not too close to the flame, being turned once or twice.

If you can lay hands on some sorrel, the purée described on pages 127 and 267 makes an excellent sauce for hake and also for cod and other white fish.

Sea-bream, occasionally to be found in English fishmongers’ shops, is a broad, rather thick, red and silver fish, smaller than the Mediterranean
daurade
but similar in appearance (in fact it is more the equivalent of the Provençal
pagel)
and makes excellent eating.

For a bream weighing about 2 lb. before cleaning, other ingredients are 1 quart of mussels, 3 tomatoes, 1 leek, a large bunch of parsley, olive oil, fennel leaves when available, a clove of garlic, seasonings, a claret glass of dry white wine.

First, clean and scrub the mussels, small ones when obtainable. Put them in a wide pan with the white wine, and let them open over a fairly fast flame. Remove them from the pan as socn as they open. When all are open, filter the stock left in the pan through a muslin, and take the mussels from their shells.

Next, put 2 tablespoons of olive oil (or a mixture of olive oil and butter if preferred) in a small frying-pan. In this melt the finely sliced white part of the leek, then add the tomatoes roughly chopped, then about 3 tablespoons of chopped parsley, the chopped garlic (which is optional), seasoning and a few fennel leaves if these are being used; when the mixture begins to look like a purée thin it with a little of the strained mussel stock. Then, off the fire, add the mussels.

Now spread a sheet of aluminium foil, or greaseproof paper, with a film of olive oil. Lay the cleaned and decapitated bream on this. Surround with the prepared sauce; wrap the foil or paper round, twisting the edges so that no juices can run out. Put on a baking dish and cook in a slow oven, Gas No. 3, 330 deg. F., for 35 to 40 minutes. To serve, turn out on to a heated dish with the sauce and juices all round. Add lemon quarters. Grey mullet and John Dory can be cooked in the same way.

Smelts are one of the nicest small fish for frying, although to fry them on a skewer, as one is always instructed to do, is a trickier business than it sounds. As served by the
patronne
at the Hôtel du Louvre at Pont-Audemer, a dish of these skewer-fried smelts is nicely described by George Musgrave in
A Ramble Through Normandy,
1855.

‘She had an extraordinarily expeditious way of frying smelts. I had bespoken a score and a half (after having seen some in the market) and they were dished as they were fried, with two skewers; fifteen on each skewer—the slender pin passing through the heads, and the ring at its extremity serving to turn them in the pan, all at once, for the more even frying.’