seafood gratin

In the highly unlikely event of anyone reading this, let alone expecting any useful cooking advice, here’s a gold plated, crowd pleasing, 5 starred, Lifetime Achievement award winning, blithering idiot-proof, gin addle-proof idea for a starter. I guarantee it’ll go with a swing on one proviso – you don’t make any mistakes.

You can call this little number a Seafood Gratin.
As the name implies - you’ll need some gratin dishes – little, shallow (about 1 cm deep) side dishes, one per person.

Off we go.
Get in some good fresh seafood – I recommend some white fish (cod, sole, monkfish, whatever), some shrimps or prawns and something else if you like (scallops, lobster, mussels)
A little goes a long way so for 6 people about 400g cooked weight should be plenty (but use your eye)
Then I allow a guest appearance of something like button mushrooms, leeks or baby artichokes.
Everything should be cooked, and if you’re in doubt, undercook it because it’s going in the oven later anyway.
Poach the white fish briefly.
Get a little water boiling, about 500ml, chuck in something flavour-enhancing if you’ve got it - thyme, bay, onion, celery, peppercorns, blah, blah.
Put some chunks of the fish in the pot for a minute or two till they’re opaque - keep the liquor, you’re going to use it for a sauce- then break the fish into teaspoon size pieces, taking off bone and skin.
Similarly, and in the same liquor poach the shrimps or prawns, if not already cooked, and any other shellfish. All shells should be taken off, big pieces chopped into bite sizes.

Any surprise guests (mushrooms, artichokes etc) should be cooked and bite sized.

From the poaching you should be left with a pretty decent fish stock. Add to it some of the white wine that, if not open, in a glass and immediately adjacent to your place of work, will undoubtedly be in the fridge. Make the ratio about 1 wine to 3 stock. Reduce to about half the original volume then add about the same amount again of regular double cream. You’re making a classic white wine, fish, cream sauce.
Reduce, sort of carefully, until it’s quite thick but not gloopy- think Farrow and Ball.
Season it with salt and pepper – for God’s sake season it with pepper AND SALT. You can abstain or go low with salt, you’ll live very long but by Christ you’ll be miserable and so will be everyone you cook for.
Add a little lemon juice. Strain it. Fiddle with it as you like.

Now distribute the seafood and any other bits and bobs among the dishes, pour over each some sauce. Don’t cover, but nearly. Sprinkle over some fresh white breadcrumbs you’ve just knocked up in the food processor, then some nice grated gruyere or parmesan, and pop under a grill or in a medium hot oven for about 7 minutes or until they’re all bubbling and golden.
You’ll need some great, crusty bread for mopping up duties.
And a killer white wine.

Is that all there is to it? I hear you ask. Is it that simple being a culinary genius?
Yes it is.
At least it is if you avoid the temptation to throw in the Utter Idiot’s favourite ingredient, best showcased in his signature dish of "Right Pig’s Ear".
Which ingredient is - witless negligence.

In other words don’t make silly mistakes.
And the most obvious mistake is buying lousy seafood. So just get the freshest, sweetest smelling you can.
If you cannot buy something super fresh, cook something else.
After that it’s plain sailing. It’s hard to overcook the fish unless you sneek in an episode of East Enders while it’s in the pot. You can get the sauce a bit wrong. Don’t reduce it too much – it should have a little room to reduce further in the oven. You can fail to reduce the sauce enough.
And in the home straight you can leave it in the oven too long (see Eastenders, above). Blackened breadcrumbs and cloying, split cream are best saved for other dishes (see Pig’s Ear, above).

Take care then take the acclaim.

The Egg Interview

So

If the secret of good cooking is the avoidance of strewing errors, there’s a question going begging here which is this – what, actually, is good food? Is good food a universal absolute or is it relative to your frame of reference?
The answer is - It’s absolute (more or less).
If you give good food to a roomful of people of different ages and from different backgrounds they’ll (more or less) agree it’s good. With a few exceptions – if one person finds something tasty, balanced, satisfying, everyone will.
Generations of families, in each culture and community around the world (if we leave aside the Blumenthals) have worked out what goes together in a tasty manner, given the animals and plants naturally available to them. So all you’ve got to do, to end up with said tasty food, is find a good cook.
Many people over the years have failed to ask me “how do you tell if someone is a good cook before you employ them?” and the answer would have been, of course, “given the immutable rule of cooking, practically anyone can be turned into a good cook, but in order to tell if someone has a real talent you use the technique famously adopted by the brothers Roux - The Egg Interview”.
In this technique the interviewee is dispatched to the kitchen with the instruction – go cook me something with an egg in it. (I like to add the flourish “surprise me”)
This is an immensely satisfying procedure for the interviewer and, often, a rather surprising one for the putative Ramsay. The rationale, of course, is that if someone can cook a humble omelette or cares to boil perfectly an egg, then they’ll probably be crazy in their attention when cooking something more complicated. It shows, also, that they “get” food, that it is the simplest things that matter.
You can see that with Ji Sung Park, Manchester United’s terrier – like left winger. I’ve never actually seen him knock up an Ouef en Cocotte, but you can tell by the way he concentrates on the simple yet essential attributes of diligent positional play and ferocious running that it would be pretty tasty.