Fish for Christmas - the follow-up

As a quick follow-up to a couple of posts made earlier this month, here’s how those fishy Christmas projects turned out:

I had made pickled herring before, using the same recipe – a family one written down by Allison’s grandmother – so I had few fears about that; both variants turned out well and were hits with our guests. As is the case with so many things, the home-made version (the garlic one for preference, personally) was better than its shop-bought equivalent.

The one I was worried about was the gravadlax. The fact that the cure was separated from the fish itself by a thick layer of dill concerned me; would two days be enough to cure the fish? And then there was the rye bread to go with it; that didn’t rise and so was very dense (should’ve realised that that would be the case where the proportion of rye flour to white was 50-50). It turns out I shouldn’t have worried – a thin slice of dense (and buttered) rye bread worked better as a base than a cracker would have done. And the gravadlax itself was fantastic! Much better than smoked salmon; I’ll be making that one again. Shouldn’t have doubted the recipe, of course. The success of this means that there will in all probability be more appearances by recipes from Tim Hayward’s Food DIY book on this blog in 2017.

Fish for Chrstmas, part 2: Gravadlax

With the herring pickling away in the fridge in the shed, it is time for the next part of the Christmas fish preparation – gravadlax. For this, I’m relying on a truly excellent book called Food DIY by Tim Hayward that I received as a birthday present; it has all sorts of recipes and ideas for those who like to get their hands dirty and expand their food-making skills. As someone who bakes bread and has even made a pork pie a few years ago, this is very much my sort of cookery book. I’ve read through and several recipes have jumped out at me, so I can foresee all sorts of culinary adventures for 2017.

But first, the Christmas gravadlax. Gravadlax is, quite simply, cured raw salmon. Hayward explains that it’s a Scandinavian thing – the word derives from the Swedish for ‘buried fish’ and originates from fishermen “saving part of their catch by burying it on the beach. Presumably the salt in the sand had a preservation effect”. Rather than the usual smoked salmon for Christmas, this year we are going for gravadlax. Our fishy festive saga started at Billingsgate a couple of weeks ago, and in addition to gutting and filleting the herrings for pickling I also filleted the whole (gutted) salmon that we bought. I ended up with two thick pieces, both about eight inches by four, along with several smaller fillets which are being frozen for other meals. The off-cuts were roasted, with whatever meat I could get from those being frozen for sandwiches at some point in the future. For now, though, the focus is on the two fillets which were defrosted yesterday, ready for being made into gravadlax.

The cure has four ingredients – salt, caster sugar, black pepper and coriander seeds, all of which were ground up in a mortar and pestle (which is which?). 

The result actually looks a bit like sand which is appropriate given how this method of preserving fish originated. 

Then there was some dill that needed chopping up. The two fillets were then laid out and a thick layer of dill applied to each, followed by the cure (which strikes me as slightly counter-intuitive, as I’d’ve thought that the cure should be in direct contact with the fish, but there you go). 

Then some not-chopped dill sprigs are put atop whichever fillet you’re flipping over.

Now for the tricky part – one of the fillets need to be flipped so that it goes on top of the other. The risk of cure mixture and chopped dill going everywhere at this point is probably why Hayward says that this should be done on cling film! 

The resulting sort-of sandwich then needs to be tightly wrapped in cling film and stored in the fridge for the next 48 hours.

So that’s the gravadlax ready – we eagerly await the result! The next part of the plan will be to bake some rye bread for it to go on. Hayward has a recipe for that, too…

Fish for Christmas, part 1: Pickled herring

Up at early o’clock last week for a visit to Billingsgate Market, London’s wholesale fish market located down in Poplar. The objective was to buy some fish for Christmas; in particular, we were after a salmon with which we could make gravadlax and some herrings with which we could make, well, pickled herring.

The market was as busy as ever – we’d got there by about 5am – and as is usual on a visit to Billingsgate, you do need to keep an eye out for the porters with their heavy trolleys. We were very quickly able to find ourselves some herrings, sold fresh at £5:50 for three kilos. They hadn’t been gutted but I’ve done that before so I reckoned it wouldn’t be a problem. 

Last time we made pickled herring we’d a hard job trying to find a fishmonger selling the stuff (eventually settling on a kosher place in Edgware that just happened to have some in stock), which was one of the reasons why we’d opted for Billingsgate this time – for if you can’t find the sort of fish you want there, you might as well give up. Then we looked for the salmon, coming across someone else selling herring that had already been gutted and filleted in the process! After getting the salmon (gutted, this one), we picked up a few other bits and pieces before going for breakfast.

This was in one of the market’s cafés, decorated with photos of porters in the old market in the City (where they wore those leather hats that they could balance several crates of fish on); that one closed in 1982 when the market moved to its current location in the Docklands. On previous visits to the café I’ve always been tempted by the smoked haddock and poached egg option (it is a fish market, after all) but had shied away from the £10 price on the grounds that we’ve not usually got much cash left by this point. But cash we had today, so I ordered it. So did Dad. Turns out that it’s a big piece of haddock so you really do get your money’s worth.

Back home, my big job involved gutting and filleting – first the herring, then the salmon (the latter had already been gutted, at least). I have a thin, sharp knife for this, and I have gutted and filleted herring for the purpose of pickling it for Christmas before; that said, it probably took two or three fish to get back in the hang of it. Once the fillets have been removed, they need to be gone over with a pair of tweezers to make sure the bones have all been removed. After this, the herring fillets were washed, dried and put in the fridge to anticipate the pickling process. The salmon was filleted – and after the fillets were cut up we had some to spare for the freezer as well as for the gravadlax (of which more in a later post).

We make two kinds of picked herring – garlic herring and, err, pickled herring. The first – my favourite – has the herring fillets layered in jars with a mixture made from shredded carrots, a shredded onion, tomato juice, garlic, pickling spice, a bay leaf and vegetable oil; this mixture is heated until the carrots and onions are cooked and then cooled and the bay leaf removed before being added to the jar with the herring fillets. Pickled herring is the herring fillets layered in a jar with onion slices, with the jar then being filled with the pickling liquid (water, vinegar, sugar and pickling spices) that’s been boiled and cooled.

This needs to be done about two weeks before you are due to serve it. So that’s one part of the food for Christmas done!

Something fishy...

To Southwold once again, where on our last day we drove down to the harbour for lunch before heading home on the A12. Located about a mile south of the town, Southwold Harbour is home to the local fishing fleet and a variety of huts that appear a little ramshackle at first glance. Don’t be fooled, though; one of these is home to the Sole Bay Fish Company which, in addition to having a fantastic fish counter where you can buy fish directly from the people who caught them (and in some cases smoked them too), has its own fish restaurant that’s only open at lunchtime.

Lunch was really good – although we were told before we even ordered that we couldn’t order anything from the giant fish-tank which contains North Sea fish! After oysters and crevettes (large prawns) for starters, we went for fish and chips, served on wooden platters with the chips in a metal container, in contrast to the mixed selection of plates on the table that we had used for the starters (I had the Dover sole, while Allison went for the lobster!). A lovely little restaurant, and full of character – we’ll be going there again, I have no doubt.

Although this was the first time we’ve eaten there, we have popped into the Sole Bay Fish Company for fish-buying purposes before – last time we were there, we got some very reasonably-priced Dover soles which we took home and, after consulting our recipe books, used to make sole meunière as laid out in Rick Stein’s Seafood (which also had instructions for skinning and pan-frying a flat fish; nice touch). This time, we had a look at the counter and picked up a smoked mackerel and a monkfish tail; fancy, that last one, but no doubt it would be delicious. They were kind enough to put a bag of ice in with the fish for the journey home.

Back home, there was one thing to do with the magnificent-looking smoked mackerel and that was to make the smoked mackerel paté in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Collection that’s been a favourite of mine for years (usually, we just use supermarket-bought fillets for it); quite simply, the ingredients – mackerel (suitably filleted), cottage cheese, crème fraiche, lemon juice – all get blitzed in a food-processor, with some pepper, salt and nutmeg mixed in.

And what of the monkfish? That was clearly another question for our cookery book collection, and I found the answer (once again) in Rick Stein’s Seafood – roast monkfish with crushed potatoes, olive oil and watercress; something of a less-is-more approach which I have come across in Rick Stein’s recipes before. For him, the fish is very much the main event here, with no need for too much extravagance to back it up. I like that.

The tail required filleting – an easy enough task (I speak as someone who’s done a seafood cookery course at Billingsgate Market and owns a suitably thin and suitably sharp fish-cutting knife); it was then salted and left for 15 minutes while I boiled up some new potatoes. The fish was fried in olive oil before being popped in the oven – the intention was to brown it although mine were still white after the recommended frying-time.

While the fish cooked, I sorted out the potatoes. Rick Stein’s recipe said to add watercress to the potatoes once they’d been crushed but we didn’t have that; we did have some rocket, though, so I improvised – the rocket was wilted in the frying-pan I’d used for the fish, and when I’d drained and crushed the potatoes with some olive oil (with a fork, as suggested!) the rocket was mixed in.

I must admit I was a bit sceptical – this sounded a little bit too easy. Also, the fish hadn’t exactly browned in the frying-pan, and they were still most definitely white when they came out of the oven. So after slicing them I quickly did them in the pan on a high heat for a couple of minutes to give them some colour. Oh, and some olive oil and balsamic (I am not a fan of vinegar but I went along with that) were drizzled on the side.

The result looked pretty fancy; which, I suppose, is what comes from serving the main event on top of the potatoes rather than next to them, and drizzling oil and balsamic around the sides. More to the point, it tasted very good too.

Scotch woodcock

Recently, I came into possession of a copy of the St Michael All Colour Cookery Book, a tome from the Seventies that has quite a few old-school recipes. I thought it might be fun to have a go at making one of these for lunch, and after a little perusing I chanced upon Scotch woodcock.

Despite the name, Scotch woodcock contains neither Scotch nor woodcock (although, in the case of the former, it’s ‘Scotch’ as in ‘Scottish’) but is a dish consisting of scrambled egg and anchovies, much in the same way that Welsh rarebit doesn’t have rabbit in it. It is not a creation of the Seventies but goes back to Victorian times – a recipe that’s a bit more complicated can be found in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – when it was served as an end-of-meal savoury. However, as my St Michael book notes, “in these less formal times it is more likely to be served as a snack”.

Now, we like anchovies in our house, but usually as a means of adding subtle flavouring rather than as the main attraction – and I certainly wouldn’t have thought of adding them to scrambled egg. Scotch woodcock, though, brings anchovies to the fore in a big way. Indeed, the recipe required a whole (small) jar of the things, more or less. The other ingredients are pretty much the ingredients for scrambled eggs on toast.

The dish was more labour-intensive that I’d thought – the anchovies had to be soaked in milk before half of them were mixed with most of the butter to make the anchovy butter. The book recommended using a mortal and pestle (which is which?) for this; I gave it a go and decided that the simpler expedient of mashing it with a fork worked better. Thus can I now claim to have made a basic version of Gentlemen’s Relish.

This was spread on some toast while I got on with scrambling the eggs. The St Michael book advises that milk should be mixed in with the eggs, which is something I disagree with – and here, I’ve got the word of Delia Smith to back me up (still, could’ve been worse; the recipe for Scotch woodcock in the Mrs Beeton book instructs you to separate the eggs and add a quarter of a pint of cream to the yolks).

Once scrambled, the eggs went atop the anchovy-buttered toast and then the final part could begin. The remaining anchovies were sliced lengthways so that they could be arranged in a lattice pattern on top of the scrambled eggs.

The result was, quite frankly, overpowering. The anchovies are in the butter and on top of the eggs, and the strong flavour dominates this dish. That’s too much for me; with anchovies, the approach really should be something along the lines of ‘less is more’.

I’ll just stick to good old scrambled eggs in future, I think.

Salt and pepper squid

When we order Chinese, one of my favourite dishes is the salt and pepper squid. This is usually deep-fried, but can you make a version that is both healthier and does not have the potential to start a fire? More to the point, could I?

Well, a Rick Stein recipe on the BBC Food website looked fairly straightforward. I rather like Rick Stein– when he did his Christmas special last month he admitted at the start that he was filming it at the height of summer, and his fish and chip shop in Padstow serves the joint-best fish and chips I have ever tasted (the other one can be found in Hastings; with all due respect to Poseidon in East Finchley, fish and chips always taste better when you can smell the sea). So I trusted his salt and pepper squid recipe. Which had the virtue of having not many ingredients; less is more!

I acquired the squid from our wonderful local fishmonger on the High Road. The guy even cleaned it for me, which was just as well as I’d’ve had no idea how to go about that.

The recipe called for two types of pepper – regular black pepper and sichuan/szechwan pepper; luckily we have both in our flat! The peppercorns had to be dry-fried and crushed with a mortar and pestle (which one is which?) before the salt was added.

Each squid ‘pouch’ had to be opened out flat and scored, with any remaining entrail-like bits being scraped off before I cut it into squares. 

Frying the squid in a small amount of oil rather than half a pan of the stuff was quick, and it was a matter of minutes before the salt-and-pepper mixture was added. Then it was just a question of throwing in the spring onions and the chilli, stirring everything together and serving.

Quick, easy and delicious, even if I do say so myself!

In the kitchen...

On the menu tonight was smoked haddock and dill risotto, a recipe Allison clipped from the BBC’s Olive magazine two years ago. It’s one of our favourite one-pot meals and it’s really simple.

For me, the hardest part was the prep work as this involved finely dicing an onion (or half an onion in this case as I was halving the recipe), which makes my eyes water every time. This was sautéed in butter with some crushed garlic – a combination that smelt divine and to which the rice was added.

To this I added some white wine, making sure that I also poured one for the cook – my little tribute to the late, great Keith Floyd. Not that this is one of his recipes, it’s just something I usually do when a recipe involves wine. That said, sometimes this particular cook has a glass even when wine isn’t in the recipe.

After the wine evaporated, it was a question of slowly adding the stock and continuously stirring – for about a quarter of an hour. 

Once the rice was judged to be cooked – the recipe calls for ‘a slight bite and a creamy consistency’ – I was ready to add the haddock along with some dill, parsley and grated parmesan cheese. At this point the mixture is just left to stand as the heat of the rice cooks the fish.

The result? A risotto dish that’s both delicious and warming, especially on a wet October evening.