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By Root 2339 0

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 SAUCE RÉMOULADE

HAKE WITH RÉMOULADE SAUCE

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.

DAURADE AUX MOULES

SEA-BREAM WITH MUSSELS

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