What I'm Eating

One of the drawbacks to living in a 1960s Modernist building with masses of glass is that when the temperature drops and you don’t have thermal curtains or adequate heating, it gets a bit cold.  So this weekend is Project Heating: we’re going to buy a new, bigger, flasher heater – I wanted to get a radiator but apparently you need to plug that into the mains and screw it to the wall, which I imagine might irk Steve our nice landlord – and also a heated towel rail for the bathroom. Luxury.

But in the meantime, I’ve been cooking up a storm of winter food. I’ve finally accepted that winter is ok after the longest, hottest summer anyone can remember: I went into shock at the market when the first Brussels Sprouts appeared a couple of months back and had to take myself off for a Croque Monsieur and a lie-down.

In an attempt to heat our place up a bit, I’ve been cooking a lot of hearty good food recently and I thought I’d blog about that for a bit. Well, more hearty than usual. I can never go past smoked fish pie though – especially now that we’ve discovered Mulleez smoked fish at the La Cigale market on Saturdays.

Mulleez puts all other smoked fish to shame. You get a good dark smoke, plenty of flavour, but the fish is so fresh it doesn’t dry out at all. So it’s still succulent and moist. God knows how he does it, but it’s also not as salty as a lot of other smoked fish – so I suspect too much salt will dry out your fish while it’s smoking.

Smoked fish pie is easy: my mum got me and my brother making it when we were teenagers. Will was the master of the white sauce, while I got to do everything else. I look back and marvel at her guile: she actually managed to get two teenaged boys into the kitchen, one of whom was so obsessive about white sauce that he would elbow everyone else away from the stove while he got it perfect, poking his index finger in and calling for more salt like a baby Gordon Ramsay.

The key is the best smoked fish you can buy – I like Mulleez smoked kahawai, because it has a strong texture that will withstand cooking and it’s also about as sustainable as fish gets these days. And if you buy a whole fish, it costs about $10 and there’s lots of it.

As noted above, the key to all this is a good white sauce. In fact it’s crucial. Possibly because I was never allowed to develop my skills in this department, it took me years to find a good recipe, and it was only this year that I thought to look in The Silver Spoon, where, naturally, I found the perfect recipe had been under my nose all that time.

So you want 50 grams of butter, 50 grams of plain flour and 500ml of milk. Heat the milk gently first and add a bayleaf if you feel like it.

Then melt the butter on a medium heat, add the flour and whisk – whisking, not wooden spooning, is key – for a couple of minutes. Don’t brown it, whatever you do. Then add the milk in one, swooping pour, and bring it almost to the boil. Once you’ve done that, lower the heat right down (this is the point at which you sigh and wish you had a gas cooker) and cook it very gently, stirring regularly but not whipping the hell out of it. It’s ready when it’s lovely and silky and sticks to the back of a teaspoon. Season with nutmeg, salt and pepper.

While you’re doing that, you should be buzzing about the kitchen getting everything else sorted. Possibly, if you had a brain, you would have done this first. I don’t, usually.

The best smoked fish pie have potato tops: use good floury agria potatoes. Bring them to the boil until you can break them apart with a fork, just, and then drain. Leave them for four or five minutes, then smash them up – don’t mash them – and mix plenty of olive oil through.

While you’re doing that, Boil two or three eggs, cool and slice.

Flake the smoked fish into the bottom of a decent-sized baking dish – I use the trusty Emile Henri gratin dish. Also, sautee a couple of chopped leeks in a stout frying pan until they’re slightly caramelised. Mix the leeks through the fish.

Pour over your béchamel sauce, mix it all properly, add the sliced eggs over the top and smoodge them in a bit. Top with the smashed potato and put in an oven on 180ª for about 40 minutes until the top is brown and the whole thing’s bubbling. Serve with, yes, some nice Brussels sprouts.