Recipe #7: "Fish Pie" (page 134-135)

This is the first of three consecutive recipes involving smoked fish which I will be working through. All three call for smoked haddock, after a cursory search of the area for places of procurement I decided to do what I already knew to be true and substitute. As I said in the introduction to this blog, I refuse to get hung up on a single ingredient and avoid a recipe as a result. That being said I do make my choices of substitution with substantial thought and shall not blindly reach for anything with semblance of similarity.

Surely the oldest retailer of its kind in Chicago, Hagen's Fish Market immediately came to mind when I knew I needed fish. I had never actually been there and was shocked to find they are the only hardwood smokehouse of its kind in the city: they will gladly smoke any fish or fowl you will bring them for a fee. I visited on a Sunday afternoon and decided on two whole 'smoked fish' (which I later idenfified as cisco) and two large steaks of smoked lake trout.

Both packages weighed approximately 1 1/4 lbs. I wasn't yet sure of how I would portion the fish between the three recipes but thought these types seemed appropriate for substitution and I headed off, still brainstorming in preparation for my fish pie.

That night I started out by hard boiling eggs for both the fish pie and the kedgeree (8 in total). Not to devote too much time to such simple cookery but I was quite pleased with the result. Bright yellow yolks came from a carefully timed period of boiling/simmering and most importantly extreme cooling afterward. Simple running water won't do it, use a large vessel and pack it with ice water. While this went on I peeled and began to boil the remainder of my russets from my failed 'Pressed Potatoes' recipe chronicled in my previous blog entry. It turned out to be a perfect amount of tubers for their need here.

I took a swift bike ride to the grocery to acquire a number of dairy products: milk, butter and the aforementioned eggs. I always keep butter at hand but had run out recently and milk I despise for uses besides cooking. With my potatoes mashed and eggs peeled and chopped, it was time to wrangle my fish.

My trout steaks were not fillets as requested in the recipe but I decided they would break down more easily once poached. First I had to cut off and pull out the twine apparently used for hanging purposes in the smokehouse. An endearing reminder from whence my fish came; the string was golden as the fish from its exposure to the smoke. I 'broke' them at their backbone so they lie flat in my Pyrex pan.

I used whole peppercorns as requested (but adamantly refused to count exactly 10 as quantified there). I also used bay leaf, while not a part of this recipe I did find things to be a bit demure again with the use of herbs/spices as typical of the book and its style. I had come across the use of bay in poaching smoked fish in a number of recipes for kedgeree which was being researched in parallel to the pie at hand.

I did not measure the amount of milk and the sole reason for that lie in the fact that my Pyrex (another component of my flame-proof glass collection) measuring cup was filled with chicken grease in my fridge from the night's previous dinner. I eyeballed 1/4th of the half gallon container I purchased which shallowly covered the meat of the fish. Looking back I should have more carefully measured. The reason why is evidenced best in a hardly related recipe: the decidedly un-British Southern American fare, biscuits and gravy.

Biscuits and gravy is an excellent lesson in the quantification of roux making and more. Your gravy begins with sausage, which renders grease. The amount of grease in the pan dictates the amount of flour needed to temper it into a proper roux. The amount of roux dictates the amount of liquid needed to create an adequate gravy. If you are making 10 biscuits you do not want a 1/2 cup of finished gravy, nor do you want a 1/2 gallon. The same holds true for this recipes creation of bechamel, which intelligently is made from your fish-infected milk. An ingenious reuse of previously used components adding untold flavor as well as simple logic.

I believe that either I did not use a full two cups (though I swore I had to have used extra, even) or too much was lost to evaporation (even though I followed the dictated temperature and time, and my milk was barely simmering when it was removed from the oven). At any rate, I began with the nearly full stick (7 tablespoons) to an exacting measurement, already aware of the careful balance of fat/roux/bechamel's mathematics.

3/4 cup of flour followed and my roux looked well balanced. However the milk added left me with something closer to batter then white sauce, even before it reduced or cooked at all. I ran to my fridge - even two steps away I was worried that I would color or scald what was in my pan - and began whisking in additional 'raw' milk which was of course sans fish flavor. This bothered me to no limit, as I knew I was diluting the well seasoned flavor of milk that commiserated with peppercorn, bay and smoke.

But I did what I had to and when my bechamel looked appropriate I began to decant it into my cleaned and reused Pyrex which was already filled with my de-boned and broken down trout as well as the hard cooked eggs.

My mash was at the ready and it followed immediately afterward. The 'plowing' technique Fergus recommends went into motion. Proof positive it did indeed assist greatly in browning but I also found it quite useful for removing excess potatoes from the top of my pie. Like the poaching solution in this recipe, the mash was neither wasted and it went straight into my mouth.

As I neared two entire sticks used for this recipe, my dotted pie entered the box of blazes for another half hour.

Peas were boiled and my beer supply for the night was exhausted. Two slices were gone quickly and another this morning. And still I cannot rid my mind of its existence in my icebox, nor the vivid campfire aroma created from the wondrous trout supplied by Hagen's.