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BAKED POMPANO WITH PRAWN OR SHRIMP STUFFING

Serves 6

1 pompano

salt, black pepper

1 small onion, chopped

1 tablespoon butter

60 g (2 oz) breadcrumbs

milk

1 heaped tablespoon parsley

175–250 g (6–8 oz) shelled prawns or shrimps

white wine or cream

Clean and season the fish. Make the stuffing; melt the onion in the butter until soft. Squeeze out the breadcrumbs in a little milk. Add to the onions and stir in the parsley off the heat. Chop the prawns or shrimps roughly and mix them in. Season to taste, and stuff the fish.

Butter an ovenproof baking dish and lay the pompano in it. Pour a little white wine over it – about a glassful – or some cream. Bake in a moderate to fairly hot oven (gas 4–5, 180– 190 °C/350–375 °F) for three-quarters of an hour.

GRILLED POMPANO WITH CUCUMBER HOLLANDAISE

Split and bone the whole pompano, or buy 6 fillets. Brush with melted butter, season, and grill with the cut side up. When the fish is almost cooked, turn it over and grill the other side if you like, but this is not necessary – the fish can be cooked completely without being turned over.

Serve with this sauce:

1 large cucumber

salt

hollandaise sauce*

Tabasco sauce

Slice the cucumber thinly. Put it into a colander, sprinkle with salt, and leave to drain for at least an hour. Rinse if the slices are too salty, gently squeeze them dry in a clean tea towel, and then chop roughly. Make the hollandaise sauce, incorporating a dash of Tabasco with the seasonings at the beginning. Fold in the cucumber just before serving, and adjust the seasoning.

BONITO see TUNA

† BRILL

Scophthalmus rhombus

There is one particular category, a category not much dwelt upon in food matters though I am sure it occupies a fair amount of the psychologist’s time, that corrals a sad group in many spheres of existence. It makes life hell in some families. It dents the morale of towns, suburbs and villages, schools and shops. I refer to the almost as good as category – for instance, Edward is almost as brave/tough/handsome as his brother Andrew. In food matters, this category can be exploited in unfortunate ways by devious businessmen – for instance, sponge-cake-with-additives-to-give-a-200-year-shelf-life is almost as good as the one you make at home with eggs, sugar and flour. Carob and that extraordinary stuff they coat biscuits with these days is almost as good as chocolate. Sometimes the almost as good as category is expanded so vigorously that it knocks out the tip-top category it was once compared with. People stop asking for the real thing because they have forgotten what it tastes like, even that it ever existed. Ice cream, sausages and properly reared, properly hung meat.

Whenever brill comes up, it is firmly placed in that category, too. Brill is almost as good as turbot. Actually, the gap is quite a large one. And perhaps I am being over-sensitive and even paranoid in suspecting that the fish trade keeps turbot from us, keeps sole from us, keeps wild salmon from us, so as to make us forget such things. Then we will stop demanding them, and they will have an easier time selling us brill, lemon sole and farmed salmon. Less worry about conserving stocks, which means less trouble with quotas. Eventually we shall end up with a choice between fish fingers and crab sticks. All fishermen will have to do is to run their vacuum cleaners over the sea bed, and transfer the haul to processing plants.

We have not, thank goodness, come quite to that point though in some fishing communities it seems uncomfortably near. Let us enjoy brill while we may, because it is a good fish of the second rank and worthy of our attention. I should perhaps add that the name is occasionally used for a most distinguished flatfish of the Pacific coast of America, the petrale sole. Although biologically the fish are not the same, they can be cooked in the same ways; recipes, too, for turbot, sole and other flatfish are all suitable as well. That goes without saying.

With all