Rick Stein's English Seafood Cookery

I wouldn’t be the chef I am today if this book didn’t exist.

I saw a copy for the first time in 1998, in the staff room at the Seafood Restaurant in Padstow. I’d started working with Rick in March that year and picked it up from the staff room table one quiet lunchtime and never put it back. I borrowed it for life. Sorry, Rick!

What makes me pick this book up even now is the way the recipes are written. I can hear Rick’s voice in his writing, and you can tell that he’d been cooking these dishes with passion for years. They make me want to cook everything, apart perhaps for the anchovy ice cream (what was that all about?). Many were on the menu when I cooked there; some still appear to this day.

Every single recipe, piece of advice and snippet of knowledge comes from a chef who had been in at the deep end running an extremely busy kitchen and restaurant. It’s genuine, something that can’t be said for many cookery books, especially these days.

When he wrote English Seafood Cookery there was very little of the technology we take for granted, no cut and paste, no Google. It’s written from experience, and Rick’s originality and take on favourite recipes he’d collected from his travels are all in here. My favourite recipes are the fish soup and the classic and original sauces. The advice on species mentions foraging for coastal wild foods way before its time. The book is full of superb Illustrations by Katinka Kew with no photography – rare nowadays.

You find yourself using your imagination a lot more when you cook from this book, a much-needed skill in an age when the “right way” to do everything is put in front of us.

Fillet of bass with mussels in a saffron sauce

Serves 4
mussels 20
white wine a splash
Noilly Prat 2 fl oz (60ml)
fish stock 4 fl oz (120ml)
saffron a large pinch
bass 4 fillets, 3 oz (85g) each
unsalted butter 2 oz (60g)
salt and white pepper

For the fish stock
onion 1 large
carrot 1 large
celery 1 stick, including the top
fish bones (including heads) 3 lb (1.4kg)
water 3 pints (1.7 litres)

Clean and peel the stock vegetables, then chop them into pieces roughly a ¼-inch (6mm) cube. The stock takes only 15 minutes to cook, so the vegetables must be cut small to extract the maximum flavour in so short a cooking time.

Place the vegetables in a large saucepan (at least 6 pints or 3 litres) and put the fish trimmings on top. Pour on the water and bring slowly to the boil. As soon as the stock comes to the boil, turn the heat right down and leave at a slow simmer for 15 minutes. Take the pan off the heat and leave the stock to go cold before straining. Making stock this way keeps the liquor clear and clean-tasting.

Open the mussels by putting them in a saucepan with the wine and cooking them over a high heat with the lid on. Remove from the heat as soon as they are open; strain them, reserving the liquor, and remove the shells and beards. Place the mussel cooking liquor in a sauteuse with the Noilly Prat, the fish stock and the saffron. Reduce the liquid by two-thirds by rapid boiling. Turn on the grill, brush the fillets of bass with melted butter, seasonwith salt and white pepper, and cook them. Finish off the sauce by whisking the butter, cut into 3 or 4 pieces, into the reduced liquid.

Put the mussels in the sauce to warm through and serve each fillet with 5 mussels and a quarter of the sauce.

Herrings in oatmeal
I was once advised by a fisherman in Padstow on the cooking of salmon. “Take a piece of fat, put it in the pan, heat it up and chuck in the salmon,” he said. He suggested the same method for the cooking of young rabbit and, indeed, almost any other piece of fish, meat or fowl he hooked, netted, shot or trapped.

The cooking of salmon in lard seemed a bit barbaric, considering the price. But to many fishermen in Padstow, salmon is no more a luxury than the odd crawfish or lobster they take home for tea. If one can ignore the price, salmon cooked in lard is pretty similar to herrings cooked in bacon fat – which is the most satisfactory way of dealing with herrings, and I should think an eminently satisfactory way of serving up salmon, too.

Serves 4
herrings four, 8 oz (240g) each
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
oatmeal 8 oz (240g)
lard 3 oz (90g)
streaky bacon 4 rashers
lemon wedges
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Flatten out and bone the herrings. Season and press them with oatmeal until well covered.

Place the lard in a frying pan and fry the streaky bacon until crisp. Remove and keep warm. Fry the herrings in the fat, flesh side first, then skin side until golden brown. Serve with the bacon and lemon wedges.