Fish in Winter
Despite the name, this is hot. I suppose the name also means, ‘Fish that’s nice in midwinter’. If you need, serve with peas or some other veg.
You need the ruins from a fridge from a houseful of six men after a winter holiday under virus curfew. Then a quick visit to the only shop open in a one mile radius. Kidding. I used,
Ingredients
A leek
Spring onions (optional)
A left‐over bag of salad potatoes, any potatos will do
Two or three big spoons of butter
Quarter of a bottle of white wine
Spoon of mustard, powder or paste
Cup of milk
Pot of single cream
Fish from the bottom of the fridge, any will do, fish fingers, battered fish fillets etc.
Black pepper. I mean proper ground pepper—skip it if you only have the powder stuff
Tools
Chopping board and knife
Pan for sauce
Some kind of deep pot for baking
Oven
Method
Chop the potatoes at least pipe‐cleaner thin but full size. You can peel or scrub skins, your choice. Use kitchen towel to grease the pot, then thow in the potatoes. That’s most of the work done
Get the oven going 2/3rds, Gas Mark 6 or your equivalent (my equivalent is full‐blast)
Thin slice the leek and spring onion. Must be matchstick thin (I wish I had a Chinese kitchen, but never mind, best I can do). Melt butter in the pan. Throw in the leak and onions. You only want to cover them in butter, not cook them. Pour over the wine. Get it hot so the alcohol is gone. Even better, boil until a little reduced. Stir in the mustard.
Pull from heat then pour in the cup of milk. Then the cream. Stir. You need enough sauce to fill that pot to the top of the veg. Adjust with more milk. Pan back on stove to get the sauce hot again, but no need to boil
Meanwhile, shove the fish into the potatoes in the pot. If you’ve got so‐called fish ‘fillets’ you might slice them. Jamb Fish fingers in as artfully as you choose. Either way, the fish can go in straight out of the fridge. You can find reams of instruction on this, but the fish is going into hot sauce—there’s no better way of defrosting, no shorter passage through bacterial hosting temperatures, than boiling the thing and into cooking. Unless you include incineration (not an artful cooking technique)
Pour the hot sauce all over. Make sure it covers any fish. Stab leek and onions downwards into the pot
Bake for about forty minutes. You are looking for the potato to cook. To test, stick a knife in and spike a slice of potato
This is hot food, be careful lifting from the oven and serving.
Variations
Potatoes. I used salad potatoes, which are waxy. You could use floury potatoes instead, but see below
Try microwaving the potatoes first, could cut cooking time to twenty mins or so
Garlic. Garlic is good
From the wine sauce you could go several ways. Don’t use cream, use flour and vegatable stock. Throw in some parsley and/or thyme
Floury potatoes will make a sauce thicken anyway
I suppose dishes like this often use a cheese finish, but I find that ugly. How about nutmeg?
Feedback
Not the kind of cooking my crew know, but once they got into it they downed a ten fish‐finger pot. Someone wanted to know what it’s called? Actually, it’s a cross. Partly it’s a non‐celebrity‐chef Potato Dauphinoise; the sliced potatoes and milk‐cream sauce. Partly it’s a fish pie; the wine base, leeks, mustard and ground pepper.