Jul 09 2008
Dull Dinner
This recipe looked so good in the book, but somehow didn’t come together as it should have.
- Smoked Cod and Cannellini
I was having my best friend from high school over for supper before the two of us went out to see a French film. This dish seemed like the sort of elegant straightforward supper a chic girl might serve to her chic girlfriend, clink some rosé spirtizer over and generally be effortlessly cool with. What follows is the first recipe in the book and I was really looking forward to eating it.
I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter- I was, believe it or not, nervous cooking without Dougal about- and I think this may be why this turned out a bit wet and unappealing. The fish is poached with white wine and celery and bay leaves and so on, then removed and the beans warmed through in a small volume of the poaching liquid. Rather than measure the ‘about 60ml’ suggested I went with the visual ‘enough to cover the beans’ and probably over estimated. This left a lot of wetness behind, as well as lots of peppercorns. These got everywhere and made eating the dish anything but elegant- we kept having to pause to fish them out of our mouths.
Altogether I felt let down by this dish; it was neither as pretty nor as easy to eat as the recipe suggested. Ach, I suppose Nigella Express can’t be the wünder-buch all the time, can it?
I too had the same experience when I first cooked this recipe. Try omitting the water and just using dry vermouth instead of white wine. Use ground pepper instead of peppercorns. Poach the fish very gently in a lidded frying pan as you will not have very much liquid in the pan and then use all of it for heating through the beans. You should end up with something a lot more flavoursome and just as quick.
Very useful to know! As I said I’d been really looking forward to this dish, in principle it seemed a good’un. I shall have a go with your suggestions at some point, thanks :o)