Posted on

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.

Posted on

Otak-otak – spicy Malaysian fish patties

This is a cold-weather otak-otak. In Malaysia, you’d be wrapping your fish mousse in banana leaves and grilling the filled leaves over a charcoal fire outdoors. In England in January, you’re going to be wrapping it in home-made banana leaves (tin foil and greaseproof paper), and, unless you’re the masochistic sort who doesn’t mind hauling the barbecue out in the sub-zero night, dry-frying in a pan on the hob.

This recipe still shouts loudly that it’s from Malaysia; it’s packed with zingy spice. If you’re somewhere where they are available, use the banana leaves and add some galangal and candlenuts to the sambal (the paste at the start of the recipe), and some slivered Kaffir lime leaves to the fish mixture – even if you’re not, I think you’ll find this surprisingly authentic. You’ll need:

Sambal
1 ½ teaspoons blachan (fermented shrimp paste – available in Chinese supermarkets and from Seasoned Pioneers)
5 sun dried chilis
4 cloves garlic
2 knobs ginger
Zest of 2 limes
1 stem lemongrass
5 shallots
2 teaspoons turmeric

Fish mixture
6 mackerel, skin and bones removed
1/2 wine glass water
1 tin coconut milk
1 teaspoon sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons coriander seeds, roasted
Salt

Put all the sambal ingredients in a blender, and whizz until they’re a paste. Set them to one side. This will pong – blachan is very strong, and when it’s raw has a distinct and non-charming smell of dead things. Suspend your disbelief and keep cooking – it starts to smell better very soon. Remove your finished sambal to a bowl.

This sambal can form the base to a lot of Malaysian recipes – it’s strong, and it’s delicious. You can vary the amount of chili that you use depending on taste (I used a lot here – these are chilis that I bought in Malaysia last year, and they’re not particularly strong). As you become more used to the flavour, you may find yourself wanting to use more blachan. It is very strong – I keep ours in the garage, in case I offend the in-laws.

Remove the skin and the spiky backbone from the mackerel. In Malaysia, this would be a threadfin – Sainsbury’s don’t carry threadfin, so you’re stuck with mackerel. Any meaty, oily fish will work well. If you have two kittens, the skins will find a good home if you chop them up and stick them in a bowl. Put the flesh in the food processor with the water and blend until you’re left with a pale puree.

Add the coconut milk, the sugar, the eggs, coriander and salt. Pulse until everything is combined, then add the sambal you made earlier and process until you end up with a thick paste.

Cut rectangles of foil and greasproof paper measuring 15 x 30 cm. Put a piece of greaseproof on top of a piece of foil and lay three dessertspoons of paste down the centre. Fold everything up carefully. It’s not meant to be airtight; the packets are there to help your otak-otak both steam and grill, so you’ll have a lightly steamed mousse with a golden, grilled bottom.

Put your little packets in a frying pan without any oil over a medium flame, and toast them for between ten and fifteen minutes, until the mousse is wobbly but firm. Serve with rice and imagine you’re sitting in a Malaysian restaurant with zinc-top tables and dripping rainforest outside.

Posted on

Smoked mackerel gratin

At work, my lunchtimes are regularly spent gossiping with friends over a pub baked potato. There is nothing wrong with baked potatoes; indeed, a baked potato can be a thing of wonder (something I hope to demonstrate in the coming weeks). The pub baked potato, however, is a sad, microwaved thing, whose cheese has been melted under heat-lamps as it waits to be served. More often than not, this means that the salad which has been shoved on the side of the plate is melting too.

Salads shouldn’t melt.

So. It’s time to rehabilitate the potato.

I love gratins; especially at this time of the year, when it’s getting cold, there is nothing nicer than lovely, starchy potato which has absorbed its own weight in scented milk and cream. You can make a whole meal of a gratin by adding extras – I had some smoked mackerel from Spinks in the fridge. A mackerel gratin is just the thing to start me feeling good about potatoes again.

I start out by infusing 240ml of milk with some thyme, a bay leaf and some parsley from the garden. This is a great application for the woody flowering tops of the parsley I can’t use to garnish (and which I should remove to make the leafy part of the plant more bushy). They’re very fragrant, and are perfect for this. I also add some celery leaves from the centre of a bundle in the fridge, a crushed clove of garlic, a clove, three peppercorns, a quartered shallot and some salt. The milk comes to a simmer and is taken off the heat while I slice the potatoes.

It’s important to slice the potatoes very thin. I wish I had a mandoline – a device to slice vegetables very evenly, and very thin. I make a mental note to go to the kitchen shop soon.

Slicing the potatoes thinly increases the surface area that’ll be exposed to the wet ingredients, and so increases the starchyness of your finished gratin (your sauce will be thicker); it’ll also result in a crisper finish. I layer them in a thick-bottomed, enamel dish, which has been buttered to within an inch of its life. One fillet of smoked mackerel goes on top of this, flaked, and then a final layer of potato goes on top.

I strain the infused milk through a sieve, then add 350ml of double cream to the herbs and spices that are left in the sieve, and simmer that on the stove too. The potatoes, fish and fragrant milk are covered with tin foil and put in an oven preheated to 220c. (Yes, I know I have sloshed milk all over the counter. And everything looks strangely glaucous because the light in my kitchen is atrocious and I have to use the flash.)

The house begins to smell very, very good.

Once the cream has come to a simmer, I remove it from the heat, and strain it into a jug with a tablespoon of grainy Dijon mustard. Twenty minutes later, most of the milk has been absorbed into the potatoes. I pour over the cream, sprinkle a little finely grated parmesan over the top, dot with butter and return the dish to the oven, without the tin foil. (I love my Microplane grater; I spent years sweating over grating solid chunks of parmesan, but I got a Microplane after I saw one being used in an Italian restaurant and asked what it was. It also does a beautiful job of pulping garlic and ginger.) I’m careful not to add too much parmesan; it’s there to flavour, not smother.

The gratin sits in the oven for another 25 minutes. When it comes out it is crisp and golden, and the creamy sauce is bubbling gently between the slices; the underside is golden too, and there is a soft, smoky layer of unctuous, creamy potato and mackerel in the middle.

This is how autumn food is meant to be.

Thankfully, I do not own a heat lamp, so the (bagged) salad is crisp and does not go wet and stinky on me.

Those particularly interested in the lore of the gratin, and the reasons for the wonderful, lactic taste that all of this messing around with potatoes and cream produces, should go directly to Amazon and buy everything Jeffrey Steingarten has ever written. This will not only inform you in wonderful, systematising detail about the miracle that occurs in your gratin dish, but will keep you implausibly happy in the bath for as long as it takes you to read it all, and then for the half hour (turn the hot tap on at this point; things will be getting a little clammy) it takes you to bemoan the fact that there isn’t a third volume.