Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [252]
Inspect the terrine: if it seems firm and if a skewer or larding needle pushed into the centre feels hot on the back of your hand, it is done. Remember that it will continue to cook a little as it cools.
Serve hot with beurre blanc* or vin blanc* sauces or cold with mayonnaise* flavoured with an appropriate herb, or coloured and flavoured pink with tomato, or green with spinach juice or the juice of a bouquet of green herbs and watercress, blanched and squeezed in muslin.
FRUITS DE MER FILLING
A recipe for seafood bound with a rich velouté sauce is a most useful one to know. It can be rolled into crêpes or piled into a large, pre-cooked, flaky pastry case, or spooned into vol-au-vent cases. Most simply of all, it can be served inside a ring of rice or egg noodles.
The quantities given here are enough for six helpings. If you have problems getting one or other of the fish or shellfish suggested, substitute what you can get that is good and fresh: in all you need a minimum of 750 g (1½ lb) total edible weight.
Serves 6
750 ml (1¼ pt) fumet de poisson*
250–300 g (8–10 oz) boned monkfish, cut in little cubes or strips or John Dory, weever or Dover sole fillets, cut in strips
6 large scallops
175 g (6 oz) prawns, large shrimps or langoustines
12 mussels or oysters, shelled, liquid added to fumet
meat of a boiled crab or lobster weighing about 500 g (1 lb) or about 175 g (6 oz) shelled crab or lobster meat
salt, pepper
SAUCE
60 g (2 oz) unsalted butter
4 tablespoons plain flour
100 g (3½ oz) mushrooms, chopped
150 ml (5 fl oz) crème fraîche or double cream
salt, pepper, lemon juice
Bring the fumet to simmering point and poach the white fish until it just becomes opaque. Remove the fish with a slotted spoon, season it and set it aside. Slice the white part of the scallops across, reserving the corals. Cook the discs of white scallop meat in the fumet. Remove them, season them and set them aside. Strain the fumet and reserve it. Shell the prawns, shrimps or langoustines, reserving any eggs. When the fish has cooled, mix it with all the shellfish and season to taste.
Meanwhile, make the sauce by melting the butter, stirring in the flour and cooking it for 2 minutes. Add the strained fumet and mushrooms. Cook the sauce down steadily until it is thick but not gluey. Mix enough sauce into the shellfish mixture to bind it nicely, and check the seasoning, adding lemon juice if it seems a good idea. Sieve the crème fraîche or cream, scallop corals and shellfish eggs together, and mix in the remaining sauce with salt, pepper and lemon juice as required.
You now have your filling and sauce ready for use and subsequent reheating. Remember that shellfish is best eaten the day you buy it.
CHOWDER, CHAUDRÉE AND COTRAIDE
These are the fish and potato stews of the Atlantic coasts of France and America, seamen’s food that can be prepared in a boat; a rough food that can be softened on land with the resources of gardens and store cupboards. I had thought that chowder sounded a thoroughly American word, even a Red Indian word; in fact it is an anglicization of chaudière, the large iron cauldron in which Breton fishermen off Newfoundland and Iceland made their soup. (It was also used on whaling ships for boiling down the blubber …) Chaudrée means ‘cooked in a chaudière’. The meaning of cotriade is more difficult to track down: a cotriade should be cooked over a wood fire, and cotret means a faggot – perhaps that is the origin of the word. The odd thing is that it always contains potato, and the recipes are closer to the American chowder recipes than the chaudrées of the French Charentes, which only contain potato in some districts.
They are the sort of recipes I like because the result tastes different every time. They are an invitation to experiment, to try adding something from the garden or larder that wasn’t available last week. Such recipes are a stated principle, not a detailed plan of construction. Each person will have