French Provincial Cooking (73 page)

French cooks tend to be rather fanciful in their treatment of salmon. Crayfish or mushroom sauces and all sorts of rather elaborate garnishes may appear with it. These seem to me to be unnecessary, if not detrimental, to a fish already so rich, but this little recipe from the Loire is excellent and provides a quick and easy way of making the best of the late season’s salmon.

For 4 salmon steaks weighing about 6 oz. each, melt 1 oz. of butter in a thick frying-pan. Put in the seasoned salmon slices, cook rapidly on each side, pour over a wine-glass of dry white wine (Muscadet or a dry Anjou), let it bubble, reduce the heat and cook gently for about 7 more minutes. There should be only a small amount of reduced sauce. Serve the salmon with a few small plain boiled potatoes and sliced cucumber.

Have your salmon cut in steaks each weighing 5 to 6 oz. Season them with salt and pepper, paint them with olive oil and grill them, not too fast, for about 7 minutes, turning them once and moistening them during the cooking with a little more oil. Transfer them to a hot serving dish and on top of each steak put some of the following mixture: 2 oz. of butter worked with a coffee spoon of yellow Dijon mustard, the juice of half a lemon, a scrap of Cayenne pepper and a little finely-chopped parsley. Keep this butter very cold until the salmon is ready.

For this dish, see the recipe for Montpellier butter on page 117. A
darne
of salmon is a fine thick piece from the middle of the fish, in this case poached and served cold. An alternative to the Montpellier butter, which is something of a labour of love to make, is a simple
sauce ravigote,
which, while containing similar ingredients, is very quickly made. It lacks the subtlety and elegance of the beautiful green butter, but is still a very attractive sauce in its own right. The old Provençal sauce for salmon on page 123 is another excellent alternative.

Instead of poaching the salmon in water or a
court-bouillon
it is more satisfactory to wrap it in oiled or buttered foil and bake it in a slow oven as explained in the following recipe for salmon trout. In this way texture, flavour and the natural creaminess of salmon are preserved intact.

A thick piece, weighing 2 to 2
lb., will take 1 hour at Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F.

Few of us now possess fish kettles in which a large whole fish can be poached, but the system of wrapping the fish in greaseproof paper or foil and cooking it in the oven produces, if anything, better results.

Cut a piece of aluminium foil about 6 inches longer than your fish. Butter it copiously, or if the fish is to be served cold, paint it with oil. Lay the fish in the middle, gather up the edges and twist them together, so that no juices can escape. Also twist the two ends very securely taking particular care that the paper touching the tail and the head is well buttered or oiled, as these are the parts which stick easily.

Have your oven already heated for 10 minutes at a very low temperature, Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F. Place your wrapped fish on a baking sheet and leave it severely alone for the whole cooking time—1 hour for a 2 lb. fish. All you have to do when it is cooked is to lay it on the warmed serving dish, unwrap the paper and slide the fish and all its juices off the paper on to the dish. A hot salmon trout does not really need any sauce other than its own juices and a little bowl of fresh melted butter. If it is to be served cold, have with it a
sauce verte
or Montpellier butter or, best of all, I think, Escoffier’s horseradish and walnut-flavoured sauce, for which the recipe is on page 127. It also makes serving easier if the skin is removed while the fish is still warm; this is not difficult so long as the fish has not been overcooked but, of course, it must be done gently and patiently.

There is one more point. A cold salmon trout eaten a couple of hours after it is cooked is infinitely superior to one cooked and kept until the following day.

Sea-bass (
loup de mer
) is excellent cooked in the same way.

‘Never with butter, never with almonds; that is not cooking, it is packaging. (It is, of course, understood that my recipes are not for all comers.) With the exception of
truite au bleu
nobody knows how to cook a trout. It is the most unfortunate fish on earth. If an atomic bomb destroyed the world tomorrow, the human race would vanish without ever having known the taste of a trout. Of course, I am no more talking of tank-bred trout than I would give a recipe for cooking a dog or a cat.

‘So, a fine fat, or several fine fat, trout from the river, fresh (that goes without saying), gutted, scaled, etc.

‘A frying-pan previously rinsed out with flaming wine vinegar. Make this empty pan very hot. Into this very hot pan, a mixture of water and virgin olive oil (a claret glass of olive oil to 3 of water). Let it boil fast. Add a bouquet of thyme and nothing else whatever except 2 crushed juniper berries and some pepper.

‘Reduce the mixture, and when there is nothing but a centimetre of fast boiling liquid left in the pan, put your fine fat, or several fine fat, trout gently into the liquid. Do not turn the fish over. Cover the pan and boil 1 minute, then 3 minutes very gently, and serve.’

JEAN GIONO: in the number of
La France à Table
devoted to Haute Provence

 

Jean Giono is surely right about trout with almonds—it is a dish which seems to me rather pointless; but I would not condemn the cooking of trout with butter in quite so sweeping a way. As far as tank or fish farm trout are concerned, and one rarely gets any other kind either in French or English restaurants or fishmongers’ shops, cooking them
à la meunière
(see the recipe for
rougets à la meunière
on page 291) or grilling them are about the two best systems. But I must admit I would never go out of my way either to buy these fish or to order them in a restaurant.

‘A trout, when it is a fairly large one, I prefer cooked
au bleu
, with the sole accompaniment of a few little curls of butter; but when chance—a happy chance—has filled your fishing basket with only a score or so of small trout, you can make an exquisite dish of them by cooking them in a
court-bouillon
in which white wine, butter, onion, salt, pepper, parsley, a clove and a little good stock have prepared, for your little fishes, a marvellously aromatic bath.

‘Then, when they are cooked, which does not take very long, you simply sprinkle them with butter in which you have cooked a few breadcrumbs until they are golden.

‘Here is an exquisite dish, even a naïf dish, but one in every way worthy of the learned gastronome.’

GASTON THIERRY:
La Table
, 1932

Allow 2, 3 or 4 scallops per person, according to size. Remove the little strip of skin and thick muscle on the outside of the white part. Rinse the white part and the red coral and drain well. Cut into small cubes. Allow 1 oz. of butter and 1 heaped tablespoon of very fine, pale golden breadcrumbs per person. Butter the deep scallop shells with half the butter, then add half the breadcrumbs. Lay the scallops on top. Season them lightly with salt and pepper. Cover with the rest of the breadcrumbs, and the remaining butter cut in very small dice. Cook uncovered in a very low oven for 20 minutes. By the time the scallops are done the breadcrumbs have soaked up all the butter; they should be golden and just beginning to turn crisp, but still moist. Obviously, the breadcrumbs soak up a lot of butter, and if too little has been used, the dish will be dry. For those who like it, a scrap of finely-chopped garlic or shallot and a little parsley can be mixed in with the breadcrumbs.

For 4 large scallops the other ingredients are 2 oz. of streaky salt pork or unsmoked bacon, a shallot or two, butter, flour, a small glass of dry white wine, parsley.

Melt 1 oz. of butter in a frying-pan, put in the finely-chopped shallots and the pork or bacon cut into tiny cubes. Cut the cleaned scallops into larger cubes, season them with pepper but no salt, sprinkle them with flour and put them in the pan when the shallots have turned pale yellow and the pork is beginning to frizzle. Let them cook very gently for 5 to 7 minutes. Take them out of the pan and put them in the serving dish. Pour the white wine into the pan and let it bubble fiercely, stirring so that it amalgamates with the juices and all the little bits left behind in the pan. When it has thickened to a syrupy consistency, add a very little finely-chopped parsley and pour the sauce over the scallops.

The mixture of pork or bacon with the fish sounds odd, but it is an old-fashioned and delicious one, although the amount must not be overdone.

The scallops which come from the Mediterranean are very much smaller than those from the Atlantic, but this method of cooking them can be applied just as well to the large variety. Slice the cleaned white part of the scallops into two rounds, season them with salt, pepper and lemon juice; immediately before cooking them, sprinkle them very lightly with flour, fry them pale golden on each side in a mixture of butter and olive oil. Put in the red parts, add a generous sprinkling of finely-chopped garlic and parsley and shake the pan so that the mixture spreads evenly amongst the scallops. Five minutes’ cooking altogether will be enough.

This is one of the best of cooked oyster dishes, but it is tricky to get the sauce to exactly the right consistency and attention to detail is important.

First prepare a very thick
sauce mornay.
This is started off in the same way as béchamel. Melt 1 oz. of butter, stir in 2 tablespoons of flour and, when it has amalgamated with the butter, stir in gradually
pint of hot milk. Cook slowly and stir constantly until the sauce is thick. Season with a very little salt, some freshly-ground white pepper, a little cayenne. Stir in 1 tablespoon of thick cream and 2 heaped tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese (Gruyère is the usual cheese for
mornay sauce
, but for oysters I prefer Parmesan). Reduce your sauce by slow cooking until it is about twice. as thick as the usual béchamel, and really sticks to the spoon.