Fish Pie

Being Good Friday today, Kerri wanted to cook fish pie. We found a tasty sounding recipe in a newly acquired cook book called Fish, subtitled “Recipes From a Busy Island”. It’s a National Trust book and is geared towards responsible and sustainable fish recipes.

The recipe was called “Tweed Salmon, Smoked Haddock and Langoustine Pie with Cheese and Mustard Mash”. We didn’t have Tweed salmon specifically, but we bought some salmon, some lovely undyed smoked haddock and a couple of langoustines, along with some off-plan pollack from our local fishmonger:

We poached all the fish with in milk and some cream, along with onion, black peppercorns and a bay leaf. The langoustines didn’t need to be cooked at this stage, but we shelled them and put the shells into the pan with the other ingredients to get some extra flavour into the milk. Once the fish was just cooked (only about 7 minutes), we removed it from the pan and flaked it. We let the flavours of the other ingredients infuse into the milk for a while longer before straining it.

We made a roux with butter and flour, then slowly added the infused milk to it to make a white sauce before adding chopped parsely and seasoning with salt, pepper and nutmeg. We distributed the flaked fish and the raw langoustine tails into an oven fish and then covered it all with the sauce. This went into the fridge for an hour to cool.

We steamed potatoes and mashed them, then added cream, butter, salt, pepper, mustard and cheese. It didn’t look quite pliable enough to spread on top of the fish, so we added a little milk. We spread it onto the fish and sauce, then sprinkled more grated cheese over the top. Into the oven for 40 minutes, until the top was nicely browned.

Having tasted the fish (which was good), the white sauce (which was good) and the mashed potato (which was good), we fully expected the final result to be good too. It was very good indeed, which we were rather pleased with after last weekend’s string of not-quite-there dishes. The fish was firm and flavourful, the sauce was lovely and not too liquid and the mash was really good; well seasoned and included just the right amount of cheese. Brilliant!