Angels on Horseback and Plaice with Nut-Brown Butter

Tonight we decided to cook ourselves a special dinner. Seeing as we are on holiday this week, we had some time to shop for ingredients today and start preparing early.

We were trying to think of dishes that would fit in well with British Food Fortnight, and after browsing various cook books, we ended up choosing two from the same book – Gary Rhodes’s New British Classics. Not that it’s that new any more, but it does contain some interesting recipes.

The first was Angels on Horseback, which are oysters wrapped in bacon. We bought six oysters and it took rather a while to shuck them – I have great admiration for people who have the skill of doing it quickly. The oysters were very briefly simmered, then wrapped in bacon and grilled for a couple of minutes on either side and served on a long slice of toast. It is the first time either of us remember eating these, and both the texture and flavour of the oyster (slightly squishy and salty and ozoney) and the bacon (um… just bacony really – it was unsmoked) go well together, complemented by the crunchiness of the toast.

For main course we chose Dover Sole with Nut-Brown butter, but as luck would have it, we weren’t able to get hold of any dover sole when we needed it. So we went with plaice, which is fairly similar. Gary’s instructions said to skin the dark skin side and implied that it would be very easy. It wasn’t. The instructions also implied that it would be easy to pull out the fish’s insides once the head was off. It wasn’t. Anyway, we eventually got there and put it under the grill skin-side up.

Then we made the nut-brown butter sauce and forgot about the fish and it caught a bit under the grill, leaving some black marks which don’t look that great in the picture. Still very tasty though; Kerri commented that it tasted like restaurant fish rather than home-cooked fish. Probably all the butter 🙂

To drink we had Nyetimber vintage 2000 sparkling wine to start with, to keep with the British theme. This was very good, with loads of toasty aroma coming from the glass even if you were nowhere near it. With the plaice we had a rather nice white Pernand Vergelesses (part of Burgundy) which went well with the fish and the butter sauce.