Aug

Fish Pie for Pi Day

Sean Sellers in Rosé Wines, Blow the Bank, Fish & Seafood 2006, Bandol, Domaine Lafran Veyrolle, France, Recipe

InterWined Food
Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine that exceeds its normal £10 ($20) threshold with one great meal, prepared following the instructions of some the Internet’s best food blogs.

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes courtesy of Emma at New Zealand’s The Laughing Gastronome and a scrumptious Fish Pie originally served as part of this year’s annual Pie for Pi Day celebrated each…March 14th or 3.14.

Red wine and fish can often mix about as well as red wine and Coca Cola. And unless you’re Basque or from northern parts of Spain, where the people, in fact, do mix red wine with Coca Cola, assume it’s true – at least for most flaky white fish. The tannins in red wine cause white fish to take on a metallic quality that ruins its flavour. It’s not pleasant and will most certainly ruin your evening meal, if not also your evening. However, red wine with red fish (think tuna steak) is an altogether different story, which InterWined will reserve for a different ‘Blow the Bank’.

Where the French have bouillabaisse, the British and their former colonial descendants have Fish Pie, a mixture of white fish in a cream sauce with a crust made of mashed potatoes and cheese instead of pastry.

A French chef working in London once told InterWined that British cuisine would rank alongside French, if only the British had the mind to hold their regional dishes in the same regard as they hold French and cook it with care. Case in point: while the French esteem their fish stew as Provencal cuisine, few English-speaking people rate fish pie as anything other than old-fashioned comfort food.

So to rectify this injustice, InterWined forewent the pairing of Emma’s Fish Pie with a New World white wine and paired it with the 2006 Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle Bandol Rosé, from La Cadiere D’Azur on the southern coast of Provence and £13 from Philglas & Swiggot.

Due to the small size of Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle, this wine might prove difficult for readers to find outside of the UK or New Zealand, where it is available online from Caros wines. In which case, InterWined would recommend other Bandol Rosés. The key is look for a rosé low in tannin and alcohol. (Alternately, a Spanish Albariño or New Zealand Chardonnay would also make very good matches.)

The 2006 Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle is almost apple-juice in colour with a light bouquet and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a flavour reminiscent of currant. A rosé might at first seem a strange and unorthodox choice to pair with a fish pie, given the inclusion of cream in the recipe. (As with salt, wine often struggles with cream.)

Fortunately, the cream sauce included in Emma’s recipe is light, soft, and, due to InterWined’s mistaking a teaspoon for a dessert spoon, wonderfully akin to a cream-based version of the thin and delicate sauce found in bouillabaisse.

Emma’s Recipe in Full

Fish Pie
(makes 2 generous individual portions)

Ingredients:
400g white fish fillets
2 bay leaves
6 white peppercorns
parsley stalks
1 cup of milk

4 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into pieces
a knob of butter

1 dessert spoon of butter
1 dessert spoon of flour
leaves from the parsley stalks, chopped

grated cheese

1. Preheat the oven to 180°c.

2. Rinse the fish and place in a pan with the bay leaves, peppercorns and parsley stalks and pour over the milk. Cook gently over a medium heat until the fish is just cooked and flakes easily. Strain and reserve the milk; divide the fish between two individual pie dishes and leave aside.

3. Cook the potatoes until tender, then mash with half the reserved milk in which the fish was poached, a knob of butter and season with salt and pepper.

4. Melt the dessert spoon of butter over a medium heat then stir in the flour. Stir for at least a minute then add the rest of the milk a little at a time to make a smooth white sauce. Season with salt and white pepper and stir in the parsley.

5. Pour the sauce over the fish in the pie dishes, then top with the mashed potato. To easily cover the fairly liquid pie filling, put the potato around the edge of the pie dish in small amounts first then fill in the middle – this will stop the potato weighing down the filling and pushing the sauce over the side. Sprinkle with the grated cheese and bake, on a tray to catch the overflow, for 20 minutes until the filling is bubbling and the top is golden.

Unlike the previous weeks’ ‘Blow the Bank’, Emma’s Fish Pie for Pi Day takes slightly longer than 30 minutes to prepare, but the rewards are well worth the additional preparation time — ed.

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