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ANCHOVY AND MUSHROOM SAUCE

Sliced mushrooms, both cultivated and wild, fried in butter, go well with many fish. I’m not so sure about mushroom sauce. The béchamel seems to dull the savour. One day, though, I found a Swedish recipe in which anchovies were used to season mushrooms, and I took the hint. A surprising combination, but it works well. The flavour of each ingredient, clear and piquant, raises béchamel sauce to the most interesting deliciousness.

450 ml (15 fl oz) béchamel sauce*

175 g (6 oz) mushrooms, chopped

½ clove garlic, crushed

3 tablespoons butter

½ tin (4–5 fillets) anchovies

150 ml (5fl oz) double cream

salt, black pepper

chopped dill weed or parsley

As the béchamel sauce simmers, fry mushrooms and garlic gently in the butter. After about 10 minutes, add the roughly chopped anchovy fillets. Stir well, and add the cream, which should bubble down to make a thickish sauce. Tip the mushroom mixture into the béchamel, season and leave to simmer together for 10 minutes or so until you are ready to serve the fish. Add the chopped herbs at the last minute.

Excellent with all the firm white fish, and with mullet, huss, snapper, and so on.

BAGNA CAUDA

One late November, we were invited to join a truffle hunt in Piedmont. White truffles, in those parts. The hotel smelled of them since the owner was also a truffle dealer. We ate them for dinner, went to bed in a haze of truffled air, woke up to them, ate breakfast in their pervading presence. As the splendid meals arrived, truffles were shaved fast and furious on to our plates, priceless morsels showering off in all directions in a fine spray to the floor from the edge of the special graters while the large flakes fell generously over the pasta or game before us. In the snowy morning, we were taken off to watch the dogs of Alba working in the woods. They leapt on the leash, thin and ravenous, like medieval hounds on a tapestry, finding truffles with such ease that we felt they had been planted there in advance for our benefit.

At midday we were taken off to a vast barn, out of the way of truffles, to a great spread of vegetables encircling a pot of gently bubbling anchovy sauce, a bagna cauda. We dug in with stalks of celery and cardoon, slices of Florentine fennel, chicory, peppers, carrots and Calabrese, stirring up the garlicky salt brew.

Next night we had bagna cauda again, this time in special little pots with nightlights underneath. It was served at the Belvedere restaurant at La Morra, and to honour the occasion truffles were sliced into the sauce. This is the recipe they gave us, and I have used it ever since – though minus truffles, I am afraid.

Serves 6

18 plump cloves garlic, skinned, sliced

milk

18 large salted anchovies, soaked, filleted, chopped or 3 × 50 g (1¾ oz) tins anchovy fillets in oil

60 g (2 oz) unsalted butter

250 ml (8 fl oz) olive oil

6 eggs (optional)

1–2 white truffles (optional)

a variety of raw vegetables, cut in handy pieces

grissini or bread sticks or long bread ‘soldiers’

In a small pan, simmer the garlic in enough milk just to cover it. The milk should gradually reduce in the 7–10 minutes it takes for the garlic to become tender – watch it, or the pan will catch. Put in the anchovies, cut in pieces, with their oil if they are tinned. Crush them down over a very low heat, using a pestle or potato masher. Work in the butter, then the oil gradually. The sauce will become thick and brown, with the oil separating out. This can be done in advance.

Put the eggs and truffles, if used, into a basket. Prepare the vegetables and arrange them in another shallow basket, or put pieces on individual plates which will eventually hold small pots of sauce. Put the bread into a jar.

Just before the meal, bring the anchovy sauce back to simmering point. Pour it into six warm pots, preferably the special kind for bagna cauda with little lights beneath them. Put a pot on each plate to serve. At table, grate