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Herby grilled sardines – gore warning!

Those Padron peppers have got me thinking about Spain, sunny weather and booze, so last night I made a selection of tapas and a big jug of sangria to eat in the garden.

It rained, so we ate indoors.

Some fat sardines, marinaded in olive oil, lemon, garlic and herbs, formed the core of the meal. (More recipes, including one for sangria, to come next week.) If you’re fortunate enough to be able to find some really fresh sardines, which are sweet and tender, this simple preparation really makes the most of them.

Sardines come with a built-in set of biological zips, and can easily be cleaned, gutted and filleted with your bare hands, without any need for a knife until you come to the end and chop the tails off. It’s all a lot less unpleasant than you might think; really fresh sardines don’t smell at all fishy, just sea-like and delicious, even when raw, and I think there’s a real satisfaction that comes from doing this kind of thing yourself.

You’ll need to start by removing the scales from the whole fish. This is very easy – just run a cold tap and gently rub the fish with your fingers under the running water. The scales will come away as you rub. They are quite large and might block the plughole in your sink – scoop them out every now and then and put them in a bowl or a bin bag at the side of the sink. You’ll need this bowl or bag to put the heads and guts in as you prepare the fish.

To gut and clean the sardine, hold the head in your dominant hand and the body in your other hand. Snap the head off downwards, towards the fish’s belly, and pull it away from the body. Most of the fish’s innards will come away easily with the head, as in the picture. You’ll find that some of the sardines are rather fuller than the others; these are the greedy or pregnant ones.


Stick a thumb into the cavity that has appeared where the guts were, and slide your thumb along the underside of the fish to open up the cavity. You’ll find the fish unzips easily up to the point about a quarter of the way from the tail where its digestive tract ends. Run the opened fish under the tap, pulling any remaining bits of gut out of the cavity, and rinse the cavity out until it is clean and no longer bloody.

Your emptied fish should look like this.


You can stop at this point, and go straight to the marinading stage if you don’t mind pulling the fish’s spine out on your plate with your knife and fork. I prefer to fillet and butterfly the fish before cooking – this means that it has the maximum surface area available to soak up the lovely marinade. Removing the backbone is, again, very easy (and probably the most zip-like bit of taking apart this strangely zip-like fish). To open the fish up, put your thumb in that cavity and push your thumb along the underside of the fish to the tail. The fish can then be laid flat on a board. Starting at the head end, pull the spine out of the fish, zip-style, and chop off the tail with a knife.


You’ll be left with some tiny, hair-thin bones in the flesh, but you can leave these alone; they are so fine that you can eat them, and they won’t prick your mouth. I like to trim the edges of the filleted pieces of fish for neatness, but you can leave them ragged if you like.

To make enough marinade for eight sardines (enough to serve two as a main course), you’ll need:

1 wineglass olive oil
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons each finely chopped parsley, oregano and basil
1 teaspoon crushed dried chilli
2 cloves garlic, crushed
8 turns of the peppermill

Mix all the marinade ingredients in a large bowl and submerge the sardine fillets in the mixture, adding a little more olive oil if necessary to cover. Marinade for at least three hours.

Sprinkle the sardines with salt and cook for about three minutes per side over charcoal or under a conventional grill turned to high, starting with the fleshy side and doing the skin side last. Use a wide spatula to turn the fillets carefully – they will be quite fragile. Baste the fish with any remaining marinade as it cooks. The skin should turn crisp and golden, and start to blister slightly.

We ate this with Padron peppers, chorizo al vino (recipe to come next week), a hunk of good bread and a jug of sangria. Not quite as good as going on holiday, but close.

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Salve, Helsinki

So here I am in Helsinki, enjoying fantastic Scandinavian breakfasts and icy-clear sunshine. It’s about eight years since I was last here, and I don’t know why I left it so long; I love this city, with its mixture of deco and modernist architecture, its lovely tree-lined boulevards, the curiously Baltic quality of light and wonderful, wonderful food.

Salve (Hietalahdenranta 11, 00180 Helsinki) is a quiet-looking little joint, opposite one of Helsinki’s harbours. Walking past on the way to the adjacent flea market, you’d never guess that this is, in fact, one of the city’s oldest restaurants. Salve is a traditional sailors’ pub, which has been serving its speciality, fried herrings and mashed potato, for more than a century.

We visited early on a Sunday evening, expecting a relatively quiet restaurant. It was, in fact, packed, and we were lucky to find a table at the back, next to the bar. There’s maritime memorabilia all over the place; huge, waxed ropes dangling here and there, a Captain Haddock-type effigy by the door, and little wooden model boats in full sail hanging from the ceiling. The menu is in six languages. This is a boon for those of you who, like me, struggle with Finnish. I can reliably pronounce only a handful of words in Finnish, including hei (hello), kiitos (thank you), kippis (cheers), olut (beer) and sauna (sauna, unsurprisingly). You’ll find that this very small vocabulary will serve you very well over here, where beer, saunas and extreme friendliness are the order of the day.

There are only a few starters on the menu – the main event is the herring, which heads up a list of mostly fishy main courses. The herring is delivered to the restaurant fresh from the boats you can see bobbing about across the road. It’s cleaned and prepared in the restaurant’s kitchens, then dredged in a savoury flour mixture, fried and piled on top of a heap of mashed potato. Although Helsinki has its months of darkness in the winter, its springs herald very long, startlingly bright days of sunshine, and the flavour of the potatoes is all the more rich and concentrated for this, especially at this time of year.

These are enormous portions, and even with the ravening hunger that results from a recent bout of flu and mild jetlag, I couldn’t finish mine.

Desserts are along traditional lines, with an emphasis on dairy and berries. There’s a free-for-all in this country on berries; you can pick what you want unless you’re in certain parts of Lapland, where the cloudberries are particularly prized and are rationed. Cloudberries, a yellow fruit a bit like a raspberry on steroids, are particularly delicious, and I ordered a dish of sweet baked cheese in a cinnamon cream with cloudberry jam. This is a traditional dish that you’ll find in most restaurants serving Finnish cuisine. The cheese resembles halloumi in texture, but is only very barely salted, and it takes on a toothsome sweetness when prepared with cream and a dusting of cinnamon. Dr W went for a glass of frozen cranberries in butterscotch syrup – another very typical dessert. I’m one of those people who find cranberries extremely bitter, especially when raw, but if you’re someone who likes cranberry juice, you’ll probably enjoy this dish; and you’re likely to find it in most restaurants serving Finnish cuisine.

Salve is a traditional and inexpensive restaurant brimming with style and local custom. Use an acidic cup of the excellent coffee to settle your stomach before you waddle back to your hotel, and congratulate yourself on having eaten a piece of real Finnish history.

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Smoked mackerel pate

This is a lovely starter (or a light meal on its own), and looks a lot more complicated than it actually is, making it a great stand-by for dinner parties. I’ve prepared my smoked mackerel pate in little ramekins, but you can also take spoonsful of the pate and wrap them, Chinese dumpling-style, in a sheet of smoked salmon tied tight with a string of chive if you want something particularly pretty to serve. The finished pate is quite stiff, so if you line your ramekins or another mould with an abundance of cling film (saran wrap for Americans) you will also be able to tug on the edges of the film once the dish is cooled and turn out the smoked mackerel pate onto a plate. Smoked fish fans in and around Cambridge should head out to the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham for some very superior smoked mackerel.

I’ve used a generous amount of horseradish here. If you can find the whole root for sale, grab it and use a coarse grater (swimming goggles can come in handy here for minimising something similar to the effects of mustard gas) on it. Otherwise, the English Provender company does freshly grated horseradish in a little jar, which you can also use to make your own creamed horseradish by folding it into some lightly whipped cream with a pinch of sugar, lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste.

I really like this pate with melba toast. See this crab pate recipe for instructions on how to make melba toast at home.

To make enough for a starter for four, or lunch for two, you’ll need:

200g smoked mackerel
200g soft cream cheese
Juice of 1 lime
2 tablespoons snipped chives
1 tablespoon snipped chervil (leave this out if you can’t find any – it’s easy to grow at home and worth cultivating, because it’s often hard to find fresh in the UK)
2 teaspoons freshly grated horseradish
Salt and pepper to taste

You don’t need any machinery here – simply peel the papery skins off the mackerel, check for any stray bones, then flake finely with a fork. Stir the flaked fish vigorously into the cream cheese and lime juice with your fork (if you don’t have any limes use a lemon – I prefer the aromatic nature of lime here, but lemon will be just fine), and fold in the herbs, horseradish and seasoning.

Pack the pate into ramekins and chill until you are ready to eat.

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Sardines on toast

Sardines on toastI suppose I should really be calling this recipe Sardines en croute or Petits poissons et tartine in order to stop you from recoiling in horror, but I am neither proud nor French. While some ingredients, particularly certain vegetables, suffer horribly from the canning process, sardines and other oily fish become dense and flavourful when tinned. They are all the better if the enterprising canner includes other flavourings. I particularly like Ortiz sardines, which are unadorned, but Waitrose Sardine Piccanti, with a couple of dried chillies lurking in-between the fish fillets are my favourites at the moment. And with five minutes’ quick chopping and some judicious spicing on your part, they can be turned into a perfect quick supper dish. Fantastic for those nights when you don’t get home until 11pm and have eaten nothing except peanuts.

To serve one, you’ll need:

1 tin sardines
2 slices white bread
1 large shallot
1 pinch paprika
1 tablespoon dry sherry
2 teaspoons soft butter
1 lime
Salt and pepper

Toast the slices of bread lightly and set aside. Slice the shallot finely and put it in a small bowl with the drained sardines and a teaspoon of their oil, the sherry, a pinch of salt and the paprika. Use the back of a fork to mush the ingredients together – the shallot should separate into delicate rings and the sardines should be reduced to rough chunks. Pile the mixture onto the slices of toast. The mixture will look very shallot-heavy (see the picture), but don’t worry; once they’re cooked, this will just give your toast a lovely sweet background to support the fish.

Dot each slice with the butter and place under a hot grill for five minutes, until the shallots at the surface are browning and the flesh of the sardines is bubbling. Remove to a large plate and squeeze over the juice of a lime. Grind a generous amount of pepper over the slices and eat while still piping hot and crisp.

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Miso-glazed salmon

Miso-glazed salmon
This Japanese way with fish requires you to think ahead by a couple of days. Once you’ve slathered it with its thick sauce, the salmon needs to cure and marinate in the fridge for at least 48 hours, by which time its flesh will be delicately infused with the flavours from the den miso. Once it’s out of the fridge, it’s simplicity itself to prepare under the grill.

Marinading fish in den miso is a delicious, traditional treatment. Japanese grocers in the UK often offer fish ready-smeared and packed under plastic for you to cook when you return home. A den miso marinade is also used in Nobu’s utterly gorgeous black cod. I’ve never managed to find any black cod for sale, but salmon is just great here – try sea bass fillets too if you can get your hands on some.

To serve two, you’ll need:

2 one-person-sized pieces of salmon fillet, skin still on
200g shiromiso (white miso)
2 tablespoons sake (Chinese rice wine is good here if you have no sake)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons mirin

Most UK supermarkets seem to be stocking miso, sake and mirin (a sweet rice wine) these days, although the alcohols will be with the foreign foods section, not in the booze section. If your supermarket doesn’t carry miso, have a look in your local health food shop. I’ve noticed that for some reason, they almost all sell a good variety of Japanese kelps, soya sauces, and miso.

Put the miso, sake, sugar and mirin in a bain marie and simmer the mixture (which is now den miso) over boiling water for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the colour darkens. Remove the den miso from the heat and set aside to cool.

Put the salmon in a small bowl and pour over the cooled marinade, making sure everything is well-coated. Cover with cling film and leave in the fridge for between two and three days, turning the fish daily.

Grilled salmonWhen you are ready to cook the salmon, lay it with the skin side down on a rack over tin foil. Grill under a high flame for about four minutes, until the miso is caramelising and bubbling as in the picture. Turn the fish so the skin side is uppermost and grill for another four minutes, watching carefully to make sure the fatty skin doesn’t catch and burn.

The fish will be sweet and silky with a crisp and caramelised skin. Serve with rice and a green vegetable.

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Bryan’s Fish and Seafood Restaurant, Headingley, Leeds

Fish and chipsFish and chips. It’s a meal as British as you can get. Every British town has its fish and chip shop. Some only dispense disappointing bags of wet stodge and vinegar, but some will sell you something astonishing – golden-crisp batter enveloping moist, flaking fish, and chips which have been nowhere near a freezer, cut by hand from a heap of potatoes in a room at the back of the shop. (The chips in this picture do, as a reader pointed out, look rather pale and anaemic. Please be assured that this is just an artifact of my rotten photography; the room was dark and I had to use the flash, which has substantially drained them of colour. They were actually several shades darker and very crisp.)

My grandparents lived near Grimsby, which was historically England’s busiest fishing port, and summers spent with them involved a diet heavy in batter and newsprint. Fish and chips down south with my parents were a little different; the northern variety tended to be fried in beef dripping in the good old days, when we had little regard for our cholesterol levels and a healthy respect for the cold-repelling qualities of a plump abdomen, but down south, where we lived, vegetable oil was the standard frying medium.

Luckily for me, my parents-in-law live only a few miles from the Good Food Guide’s Fish and Chip Restaurant of the Year. Bryan’s, tucked down a side-street in Headingley, serves fish and chips in the proper northern tradition. It’s been in the same location since 1934, and although it’s seen some changes in that time (Dr Weasel’s father, Professor Weasel, remembers 1970s formica-topped tables and old ladies in greasy aprons – now it’s much more chi-chi, with a carpet, glossy banquettes and dishes like salmon with asparagus hollandaise alongside the fish and chips), the core of the business, namely that astonishingly good plate of battered haddock and crisp fried potatoes, remains the same.

Mushy peasThere’s a certain amount of ritual involved with ordering fish and chips. There must be strong, hot tea to drink alongside your meal – none of your Darjeeling or Earl Grey here, though; it must be builder’s tea, with lots of milk and sugar. You need an accompanying plate of bread and butter (preferably in alternating slices of white and brown). There must be a dish of mushy peas; these are dried marrowfat peas which have been simmered until soft, alarmingly frog-green, and sludgy (and which have been famously mistaken for guacamole by soft southern politicians visiting the frozen north). Your chips should be anointed with malt vinegar, and salted heavily. This is so very important that John Major interrupted his day-job back in the 90s to advise people that the vinegar should be added first, in order that the salt is not rinsed off by the gushing torrents.

ShandyI like a glass of shandy with my fish and chips. It’s a throwback to a mildly alcoholic childhood with my grandmother, who used to feed us sherry before Sunday lunch at home with gay abandon, but who found that the fish and chip shop wouldn’t serve her 10-year-old granddaughter and even younger grandson lager, so had us make do with shandy. My glass at Bryan’s was half Tetley beer from the brewery down the road, and half lemonade.

Bryan’s fish and chips comes in a variety of sizes and cuts. While cod stocks are so threatened, Bryan’s and many other restaurants will not serve the fish, but this is no skin off my nose; I’ve always preferred haddock anyway. There’s also plaice, hake and halibut, all encased in a shatteringly crisp, salty batter. Fish and chips done well requires exceptionally hot fat, which makes the thick-cut chips wonderfully crisp on the outside and fluffy within. It also means that the fish cooks so fast that done properly, the flesh inside the batter is uniquely juicy, flaking at the touch of a fork.

If you’re in or near Leeds, take the detour to Headingley and order yourself one of these giant plates of haddock, sized for Yorkshire appetites. I can’t think of another meal that costs less than £10 which comes close to being this good.

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Crab pate with Melba toast

Something deep in the lizard-bit of my brain seems to be saying that I need to eat more fish. Ever alert to what my inner lizard is telling me, I’ve been eating a lot of seafood this week. And when the weather’s warm and humid, nothing is nicer than a glass of wine and some chilled crab pate on Melba toast.

Dressed crab is always curiously inexpensive in the supermarket – doubly curious, when you consider how delicious it is, and how easy it is to work with, all ready-shucked and packed in its own carapace, so you don’t have to be a chef at Hotels in Blackpool or a Michelin Star winner to be able to turn it into something incredible. To make enough pate for two smug fish-lovers, you’ll need:

1 dressed crab
2 tablespoons melted butter
Leafy parts of a stick of celery
½ teaspoon quince jelly (if you can’t get hold of quince jelly, use redcurrant)
1 teaspoon tarragon leaves
Small handful chervil
Juice of half a lemon
½ clove crushed garlic
Pinch of cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper

Put all the ingredients in the blender and whizz until you have a fine purée. Pack the resulting pate into a greased mould (I used a silicone muffin mould, which looks like a timbale mould in shape, but is easier to handle) and chill for an hour, until the pate is firm enough to turn out in one piece. Dress with chives and some more chervil.

The tiny amount of fruit jelly in this really brings out the strangely fruity sweetness of the crab. We ate the pate with Melba toast, which is delicious and looks dreadfully complicated. It’s actually simplicity itself. Just toast white sliced bread in the toaster as usual, and when it’s done, slice off the crusts. Separate the two sides of the slice of toast from each other by pushing a sharp knife through the soft bread in the middle of the slice, and grill the white side of each bifurcated toastlet under the grill until it’s golden and curling. Pour a glass of Semillion Chardonnay and get munching.

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River Farm Smokery, Bottisham – home-made taramasalata

This sticky pair of sci-fi slippers isn’t some poor creature’s lungs. It’s my supper – a beautifully smoked chunk of cod’s roe from River Farm Smokery, a couple of miles outside Cambridge. Dan, the smokery’s production manager, contacted me a couple of weeks ago and whetted my appetite with a pack of some exceptionally fine smoked salmon. I dropped in on Thursday and bought a selection of the fish on offer in the smokery’s little shop. (I shall be back shortly to throw myself upon the meat counter and the smoked olives – everything I came home with was seriously, seriously good.)

Cambridge and Newmarket readers take note – this place is on your doorsteps, and if my experience is anything to go by, you don’t know it’s there. Dan keeps a blog about the smokery, on which there is a handy map, so you have no excuse. The shop also carries a really thoughtful range of delicatessen products, and if that’s not enough to convince you, the glorious smoked salmon actually costs less than it does at the supermarket.

Dan showed me around the smokery; I’ll go back soon with a camera. Hot and cold kilns, thick, fragrant tar, bags of oak chippings, eels, olives – and my God, the soft, downright seductive smell of all that smoke. Someone should bottle it and sell it. (It is my sad duty to report that Stilton cheesemakers have done the same and are trying to market the smell of feet as a ladies’ perfume.)

Alongside the smoked salmon, trout, eels and an excellent mackerel pate were more unusual offerings, including these roe – peeled and released from their tough skins in this picture, so you can make out the mass of tiny eggs. Dan says that he sells a lot of these roe for spreading as they are on toast. I decided to use them for taramasalata. Some taramasalata recipes will tell you to soak the whole roe before peeling, but I didn’t find that necessary with these, which weren’t over-salted. If you are in Greece, use pressed, salted grey mullet roe. If, like me, you have never seen a pressed, salted grey mullet roe, go with the smoked cod’s roe. It’s fantastic.

To serve four, you’ll need:

  • 4 slices white bread
  • ½ cup smoked cod’s roe, skin removed
  • 1 clove garlic
  • ½ red onion
  • Juice of 1 ½ lemons
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • Black pepper to taste

Grate the onion and garlic and put in the food processor with the bread, roe, pepper and lemon juice. Whizz until everything is smooth, and with the blades still whirring, dribble the olive oil into the mixture in a thin stream, as if you are making mayonnaise. When everything is amalgamated, transfer to a bowl, and refrigerate for half an hour for the flavours to meld. Serve with strips of pitta bread and raw vegetables. The taramasalata will keep in the fridge for around a week.

While you eat, consider the fact that despite the pink roe and the red onion, this is not remotely as pink as the factory-processed stuff you’ll get in supermarkets and, sadly, in many restaurants. There’s a reason for that. It’s called food colouring. Oh – and Alban, who asked me for more quick recipes, should be pleased to learn that he can make this in under half an hour, so no more excuses; get cooking.

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Honey-mustard dill sauce for smoked salmon

Before we get onto the recipe, some family boasting is in order. Mr Weasel had his viva voce yesterday, and was let out after two hours fierce examining with no corrections to his thesis. This means that in June, he’ll become Dr Weasel at a ceremony for which I get to wear a hat. Well done, sweetheart!

Onto the food.

Evelyn Rose is an English cookery writer who specialises in Jewish family recipes and entertaining on a large scale. This recipe is from her The Entertaining Cookbook, published in 1980, which I seem to find myself drawn back to on every large family occasion. She has a calm and deft ability with cooking for large groups, and all the recipes I’ve tried have been foolproof. I use my mother’s copy, which she’s had for twenty years; most of its pages are falling apart now, and the cucumber salad page is splattered with two decades of the best sugary Swedish dressing in the world. Sadly, the book seems to be out of print now, although I have spotted second-hand copies online for around £40. Fortunately, I am frequently to be found in second-hand bookshops, so it’s likely I’ll find a cheaper copy some time before I get too old to read.

Update: I finally found a copy of the book in late 2007, at the tender age of 31, for a mere quid on good old eBay.

This dill mustard is far better than the stuff from a jar. It’s my favourite accompaniment for smoked salmon; try it with salmon, some buttered rye bread and a small salad. Evelyn Rose says it keeps in the fridge for a month – here, it’s never hung around long for enough for me to test that assertion. The ingredients list may sound a little unorthodox, but I promise you it’s the nicest honey-mustard dill sauce you’ve tried.

To make a small bowlful (enough for ten people or more) you’ll need:

4 rounded tablespoons mayonnaise (I used Hellmann’s)
1 level tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 level tablespoon clear honey
2 teaspoons soya sauce (I used Kikkoman)
White pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh dill (or more to taste)

Just mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl until everything is well-blended, and chill for a few hours before serving so the flavours mingle. I prefer freshly ground black pepper in this recipe, and usually use far more dill – two of the regular-sized supermarket packs, or about five tablespoons when chopped finely.

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Smoked salmon kedgeree

Kedgeree is one of those curious dishes to come out of colonial India, with European ingredients (in this case smoked fish, usually haddock) alongside Indian spices and rice. There’s an Indian dish called Khichri which is a close cousin of our kedgeree, made from rice, lentils, onions and spices.

Here in the UK it’s a (now rather uncommon) breakfast dish. When I was a kid, our neighbours used to invite the whole street round for a New Year’s breakfast, in which kedgeree played a starring role. Kedgeree is a good idea if you’ve a lot of people staying in the house; you can prepare it the day before and microwave it for a very rich and delicious brunch.

This kedgeree is a bit more delicate than the traditional smoked haddock version. It uses barely cooked smoked salmon and fresh, sweet and juicy king prawns, and instead of strong onion, I’ve used spring onions. The salt used in curing the salmon is sufficient for the whole dish; you will not need to add any extra.

It’s important that the rice is chilled before you cook; if it is warm or hot, the grains are prone to break up and become mushy in cooking.

To serve four, you’ll need:

100g basmati rice, cooked and chilled
10 spring onions, chopped
1 inch of ginger, grated coarsely
1½ tablespoons Madras curry paste (I used Patak’s)
10 raw, peeled king prawns
1 pack smoked salmon, torn into shreds
1 egg per person
½ pint chicken stock
¼ pint double cream
1 handful coriander, chopped
1 knob butter

Carefully slide the eggs into boiling water and boil for six minutes; the yolk should still be soft, and the white just set. Peel, halve and set aside.

Stir fry the ginger and spring onions in a wok until soft, then add the curry paste and prawns and stir fry until the prawns have turned pink. Add the rice to the wok and stir fry. After five minutes, add the stock and salmon, and continue stir frying until the salmon has turned opaque.

Remove the wok from the heat and add the cream and coriander. Stir well, and serve with a segment of the soft, creamy egg.

This dish is inextricably associated with New Year in my head, so I served it this evening with a glass of toasty, nutty champagne. Delicious.