Don't Sweat the Aubergine

seasoning; you may not need any salt, because the fish is salty. The sauce should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. 2
    Pull the fish off its skin, separating it into decent-sized flakes (it’s easiest to do this by hand). Stir the flakes gently into the sauce. Then pour this mixture into a pie dish (pre-warmed in the oven), and cover it with the mash. Cut the butter into little pieces, and dot them on top.
    Bake the pie as in the shepherd’s/cottage pie recipe: in a gas mark 1/140°C oven for about 20 minutes, before browning the surface under the grill.
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VARIATIONS
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    You don’t have to use smoked haddock. Any fish (including salmon, but not including mackerel and sardines) will do; but smoked fish works particularly well.
    Add sautéed mushrooms to the sauce ( see here ). Or stewed leeks ( see here ). Or cooked, peeled prawns.
    Hard-boiled eggs are nice in a fish pie. The problem is that they are usually hard-boiled before they go in; then they get 20 minutes in the oven, and overcook. Try this: boil the eggs (one for each person) for 6 minutes; drain them and cover in cold water (to arrest the cooking). Peel them, and bury them gently, whole, in the fish and sauce mixture just before you cover the whole lot with mash. They should finish cooking with the pie. If they’re still a little soft, will you mind?
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • Pre-cooking the fish . The fish is about to be immersed in sauce and put in the oven for 20 minutes. Even at this low temperature, it will cook through. But if you simply added skinned, raw, chopped-up fish to your béchamel, it would exude a good deal of its own liquid and thin the sauce to a probably disastrous extent. The pre-cooking allows it to shed some of its liquid, flavouring the milk; it also enables you to skin and flake the fish more easily. You bake the pie at a low oven temperature in order to try to ensure that the fish does not overcook. But the top will not be brown after 20 minutes at gas mark 1, so you need the grill as well.
    2 • Thick sauce . The sauce will undergo conflicting processes in the oven. The further cooking will thicken and concentrate it; but any further liquid from the fish will thin it. A sauce that’s too thick is preferable to a runny one, so err on the side of thickness.
Pan-fried fish
    I sympathize with Elizabeth David in her dislike of the term ‘pan-fried’. It seems factitious, created because chefs think that ‘fried’ sounds a bit downmarket – just as executives think that they appear more dynamic if they ‘head up’ rather than simply ‘head’ an organization. ‘Waiter, is this fish fried?’ ‘No sir: it is pan-fried.’ (The chef’s phrasal verb ‘fry off’, meaning to fry something to rend its fat or to temper its flavour, is similarly irritating.)
    Having got that off my chest, I have to admit that the term creates a useful distinction between fish that is fried in a thin layer of fat, and fish that is immersed in fat completely, usually with the protection of a coating such as batter.
PAN-FRIED SOLE OR PLAICE FILLETS
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HOW TO COOK THEM
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    For 2
    Your largest, 28cm frying pan may just be able to contain 4 fillets of fish. Season them on both sides with salt, and pepper if you like, and dredge the flesh sides in a plate of flour, to give them a light dusting. 1 Put the pan on a medium heat, and add enough butter to provide a generous coating to the surface, with 1 dstsp or so of sunflower or olive oil. 2 When the butter is foaming, slip in the fish, skin side down. 3
    The fish won’t take long to cook. You might turn a thin fillet after a minute, and give it no longer than 30 seconds on the flesh side.
    Lift the fillets, skin side up, 4 on to warm plates. Pour away the butter and fat. Add more butter – 50g, say – to the pan, and swirl it around until it’s melted. Throw in a chopped handful of parsley, and squeeze over the sauce 1 tbsp lemon juice. Pour the sauce on to the plates with the fish.
    Spinach ( see here ) is an ideal accompaniment; boiled new potatoes, too ( see here ).
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VARIATIONS
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    Any fish fillets, provided they are not very thick, will be good when given this treatment.
    I think that sole, plaice and other delicate white fish need no further embellishment. Salmon, though, will take the addition of strong extra flavourings. Try Nigel Slater’s idea: fry the salmon as you would the sole or plaice (see above – the salmon will need longer in the pan), discard