Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [80]
Using small white soufflé dishes, one for each person, he puts in a layer of chopped, skinned and seeded tomato with seasoning, then a thick layer of flaked smokie fillets. The whole thing is covered with good thick Jersey cream and baked in a hot oven until lightly browned. Most delicious. You could add a fine grating of Parmesan or nicely dried out Cheddar.
Traditional Scottish ways are to steam or heat the smokies in an oven or under a grill, then to open them up, remove the backbone and pepper the inside well. Spread with butter, close the fish again and continue to heat gently. Be careful not to overdo the heat, since the fish are already cooked.
If you would like to buy smokies by post, ring or write to R. R. Spink & Sons, 13 High Street, Arbroath, Tayside, Scotland (0241–73246).
† HAKE & SILVER HAKE
Merluccius merluccius & Merluccius bilinearis
In the years since Fish Cookery first came out, I have once or twice been in trouble for not paying enough attention to hake. Protests came from Northern Ireland and from English readers living in Spain. My lack of judgement – or rather experience, to be fair – upset me even more when Alan Davidson declared that the first page of his North Atlantic Seafood, the magistral companion to Mediterranean Seafood, written in Vientiane where he was then ambassador, was a recipe for hake. A friend there gave him this splendid dish for hake set in its own jelly and served with a cucumber cream sauce, which came not surprisingly from Portugal. I give a resumé on p. 163.
On further investigation, it seems that while the Irish may fish hake in abundance and eat it, for all I know, every Friday and fast day of their lives, they do not treat it well. There is a lack of culinary enthusiasm about Irish cooking that drove even an optimist like the writer Maura Laverty to despair. She had learned about fish in Spain, wonders at the scarcity and price of fish in Ireland – ‘In this country, each Friday brings such a realization of the financial disadvantages of being a Catholic that one has to think quickly of its spiritual advantages in order to remain in a state of grace.’ Seems to me as if they suffer the disadvantages of Puritanism along with Catholicism. Even in the wry cheeriness of her Kind Cooking, with its charming decorations by Louis le Brocquy and dreadful photographs that look as if they had been supplied by the PR departments of sundry food manufacturers, Maura Laverty reduces the huge possibility of the North Atlantic ocean to the single word Fish – as in Fish curry, Fish baked in milk – for most of the recipes of the small section concerned.
That was in 1950, so perhaps I am being unfair, and Maura Laverty’s gifts were not Elizabeth David’s (her Book of Mediterranean Food came out in the same year, and began a quiet revolution in our kitchens). All the same, as far as hake is concerned, I turn firmly south, and in particular to Spain and Portugal. North Americans have a minor appreciation of two or three hake species. In Gloucester, they salt fresh hake for a few hours, then treat it in a similar manner to the New England salt cod dinner, i.e. it is poached and served with a number of vegetables including beetroot, p. 106. A.J. McClane in his capacious Encyclopaedia of Fish Cookery, has this to say: ‘During our winter months after a sudden temperature drop, it’s not unusual for a coldkill of hake to occur along the beaches of New York and New Jersey. Thousands of “frostfish” are washed ashore and collected by savants who dwell by the waterside. This bounty is usually harvested at night by walking the surf edge with a flashlight. Sea gulls quickly consume the frozen hake at dawn’s first glow.’
Where I differ from Mr McClane