The Fish Course [antikvár]

Introduction I have always loved fish. I was fortunate to be born near the sea and brought up in a home where we regularly ate fresh fish of all kinds. By 'fresh fish', I mean really fresh. Literally hours from the catch being landed and sorted, my father would march in with a box of whatever had caught his eye - mussels, skate wings, cod, herring, plaice, mackerel and so on. Using an ancient but extremely sharp knife, he would fillet and prepare the fish in a matter of minutes. Cooking was simple and homely. Fish was never overcooked, and was always followed with plenty of vegetables. Now that I have my own family it has slowly dawned on me how lucky I was not to be subjected to a diet of frozen convenience foods. Leaving home, I soon decided that the richly sauced restaurant approach to fish was not for me. Worse still, the restaurant or hotel 'fish course' was often a miserable, indefinable, fried or boiled object, apologetically squeezed in between the starter and meat course. But in fish cookery the different and subtle flavours of fresh fish and shellfish should speak for themselves and take pride of place on the table. The most critical judges ofall-my children-agree. I also discovered that fish was often far from fresh, usually overcooked and generally cloaked in rich, heavy sauces. I was astonished how many of my new friends didn't know the head of a mullet from the tail of a plaice, much less how to prepare, fillet and cook them. I could find only a handful of struggling fresh fish shops and these tended to have a disappointing range of fish: cod, plaice and haddock with the occasional tray of tired shellfish, and a freezer stocked with fish fingers. My first holiday abroad was a revelation. Along the coast of the Mediterranean (relatively unpolluted in those days) I sampled my first bowl of bouillabaisse - home-made, cheap and exotic. There followed many more delightful discoveries during a six-week journey along the coast -astonishing platters of seafood, velvety soups, lobsters split and grilled, barbecued squid and roasted monkfish. This was quite a culture shock for a provincial English girl. It was not so much that the British didn't know how to cook fish in their own traditional way, I thought, but that they needed reminding. For that matter, I needed reminding. So when I moved to the Isles of Scilly twenty years ago, I was very soon rolling up my sleeves and dealing with lobster, crab, the occasional octopus and all kinds of sea fish. I taught myself how to gut and fillet by watching the fishermen. I asked them to save for me the spider crabs that were thrown back into the sea, along with conger eels and other fish for which, sadly, there was no demand. My father reminded me of curious delicacies like cod cheeks and skate nobs, and I introduced him to the delights of seafood salads with