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Serves 6

6 gurnards

2 onions or 2 large shallots, sliced

bouquet garni

2 glasses dry cider

1 tomato, sliced

2 tablespoons double cream

chopped parsley

STUFFING

90 g (3 oz) butter

300 g (10 oz) mushrooms, chopped

1 chopped shallot

2 large tablespoons good sausage meat

1-cm (½ -inch) slice bread

milk

chopped parsley

1 sprig of thyme

lemon juice

salt, pepper

Make the stuffing first. Melt the butter and fry the mushrooms and shallot and sausage meat gently. Squeeze the bread in a little milk, just to moisten it, and add to the pan. Season with parsley and thyme, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Divide this mixture between the six gurnard.

Butter an ovenproof dish which will hold the stuffed gurnard cosily. Tuck the onion slices and the bouquet into the gaps. Pour in the cider and dispose the tomato slices in a decorative manner on top. Bake in a moderate to fairly hot oven (gas 4–5, 180–190°C/350–375°F) until the fish are cooked – about half an hour. If the dish seems dry, add a couple of spoonfuls of water during the cooking. About 5 minutes before the end, pour the cream over the whole thing. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve.

† OCTOPUS Octopus vulgaris & O. dofleini

One of the most familiar sights of a trip to Greece is a fisherman on the rocky edge of a harbour or beach, beating an octopus. There is something heroic about it, a scene from an ancient Attic vase. Watching it, you feel the link with a past of two thousand years and more. Now I learn that all this muscular activity is unnecessary, no need for all this swing and bash, swing and bash nine and ninety times. The octopus has been maligned. It is as tender as a chicken.

All you need to do, once it has been cleaned, is to dip it for 4 or 5 seconds in a pan of fast-boiling water, then let it cool for a minute and dip again. Out for another minute and then back it goes for the third time, but lower the heat to maintain a bare simmer and leave for an hour. Now all you have to do is to drain it, cut it up and finish it in one of the stews or sauces from the squid or lobster chapters. You do not even need to skin it.

Enlightenment – or disillusion, according to your temperament – comes from A.J. McClane and his splendid Encyclopaedia of Fish Cookery. ‘This process’ – which is followed in Spain – ‘of dipping, as opposed to submerging the octopus in boiling water, denatures the protein gradually and when left to simmer it will not toughen.’

Since we have begun at the end, I propose to return to the alpha of the matter – the cleaning. Mostly you will not need to bother about this, as all the preliminaries will have been concluded by the time the fishmonger sells you an octopus (bear in mind that it can shrink enormously in the simmering when you decide how much to buy and check that there is a double row of suckers on the tentacles since there is an inferior species which has only one row). But should you be given an octopus by an amiable fisherman, it would be a shame not to know what to do. The most obvious thing about an octopus, and the reason for its name, is its eight tentacles (okto and pous being Greek for eight and foot) encrusted with suckers. They come together and end in a collapsed looking bag, which is the head. This is easily turned inside out so that the bits and pieces inside can be removed: save the ink sac if it is needed for the recipe.

Before I learned the Spanish method above, I used to put the whole octopus into a covered Pyrex dish and leave it in a low oven – say gas 2, 150°C (300°F) or even lower – for an hour at least. A glance from time to time would reveal the interesting stages as the octopus turned from its original blueish-grey colour to a rusty sort of pink, and became submerged in its own liquid.

A standard way of cooking octopus is to fry an onion in olive oil with a little garlic, add tomatoes, wine, a little water and herbs, and then put in the pieces of octopus that have had