Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [29]
A lunchtime dish, to be followed, prudently, by no more than a salad and some fruit.
NOTE The amount of cream can be varied in quantity (upwards) and type (mix in some single cream).
PISSALADIÈRE
If you are a cook living in the Mediterranean, the sun does half the work for you. Tomatoes and onions have acquired a concentration of sweet richness: olive oil, olives and anchovies flavour them to perfection. This combination is known to us all in the form of the pizza which has sadly become a cliché – I have even seen it described as an American national dish and, to be fair, people like Alice Waters have turned it into an elegant creation of the most skilful cooking. Mostly, though, it is plain awful, unless you find yourself in Naples where it all began and where in some pizzerie you will find the real original rustic sort of dish, baked in the right sort of oven.
At home you will do better with the Pissaladière – no connection, in spite of the similar sounds. Pizza means pie. Pissaladière takes its name from pissala, the modern descendant of those vigorous Roman confections known as garum and liquamen (see Anchovy Introduction). It can have a little tomato flavouring – Italian influence – but really it is an onion tart. You can make it on a bread base, like a pizza, but the contrast of a crisp sort of pastry, pâte brisée or shortcrust is really more agreeable. (It may be heresy to admit this.)
Serves 6
2 kg (4 lb) onions, sliced
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
olive oil
1 large bay leaf
½ teaspoon thyme
salt, pepper
2 tablespoons tomato concentrate or well-reduced purée (optional)
25–28-cm (10–11-inch) pastry case, baked blind
2–3 teaspoons pissala or about 9 anchovy fillets, soaked
60 g (2 oz) black olives, preferably the tiny niçois kind
Cook the onions and garlic slowly in a little olive oil, with the bay leaf and thyme. Cover the pan to begin with, then remove it so that the mixture does not become watery. Season, having regard to the anchovies and olives, and mix in the tomato if used. Spread the pastry with pissala, if that is what you are using. Put the onions on top evenly. Dispose the anchovy fillets and olives on top of them.
Pour over a little olive oil and bake in a fairly hot oven, gas 6, 200 °C (400 °F) for 20 minutes or so, until the pastry is properly cooked and the olives are beginning to wrinkle.
Eat hot or warm with a glass of red wine – splendid picnic food.
SALADE NIÇOISE
When Mediterranean dishes are taken up by northerners, they become a kind of dustbin. Pizza is a sad example. We lose all sense of the basic austerity of the south. Salade niçoise was once the simple food of a none too wealthy community. Tuna fish has, for instance, been far too much of a luxury to be included until recently. To us, on the other hand, tiny broad beans and young violet-leaved artichokes and basil are luxuries. They are what give the salad its special character, along with tiny black niçois olives. Don’t spoil it with cooked French beans and potatoes. If you can’t get broad beans or artichokes young and tender enough to eat raw, steam or boil them lightly before adding them to the salad.
Serves 4–6
500 g (1 lb) tomatoes, quartered, skinned
salt
½ clove garlic
3 hard-boiled eggs, quartered
1 cucumber, peeled, thinly sliced
2 small green peppers, seeded, thinly sliced
6 spring onions, sliced
175 g (6 oz) shelled small broad beans or 8 small, trimmed violet-leaved artichokes, thinly sliced
12 salted anchovy fillets, soaked, cut in 4 or about 300 g (10 oz) cooked or canned tuna, flaked
100 g (3½ oz) small black olives
olive oil, large basil leaves,