Truite aux amandes

"It is a dish which seems to me rather pointless."

Elizabeth David

I went to the market today because I needed to stock up on all those fresh fruit and vegetables that Coles was urging me to eat yesterday, and also because I fancied fish for dinner and the fish in the market was to die for. I pondered on salmon, on mackerel, ling, snapper and even flake, but in the end settled on a trout - yes just one - I think it will be big enough for the two of us, and on the way home I thought that I would try truite aux amandes - a classic dish I thought and one that I think I have had only once, but which I loved.

I thought it might be one of those classic French dishes with a history of disputes about who invented it, but I can find absolutely nothing about its history at all. I did find a lot of differing opinions though, from Elizabeth David's intense dislike to various chefs extolling its virtues.

Elizabeth David first. She is the first person I found to have it in her book. Well actually not so. There is an entry in the index, but when you go to the actual page you find a fairly long diatribe against it. She quotes Jean Giono - a famous twentieth century French writer at length and it was interesting enough for me to quote in full here. It also includes a recipe for an alternative way of cooking trout.

"Never with butter, never with almonds; that is not cooking. It is packaging. (It is of course, understood that my recipes are not for all comers.) With the exception of truite au bleu nobody knows how to cook a trout. It is the most unfortunate fish on earth. If an atomic bomb destroyed the world tomorrow, the human race would vanish without ever having known the taste of a trout. Of course, I am no more talking of tank-bred trout than I would give a recipe for cooking a dog or a cat.

So, a fine fat, or several fine fat, trout from the river, fresh (that goes without saying), gutted, scaled, etc.

A frying pan previously rinsed out with flaming wine vinegar. Make this empty pan very hot. Into this very hot pan, a mixture of water and virgin olive oil (a claret glass of olive oil to 3 of water). Let it boil fast. Add a bouquet of thyme and nothing else whatever except 2 crushed juniper berries and some pepper.

Reduce the mixture, and when there is nothing but a centimetre of fast boiling liquid left in the pan, put your fine fat, or several fine fat, trout gently into the liquid. Do not turn the fish over. Cover the pan and boil 1 minute, then 3 minutes very gently, and serve." Jean Giono

Elizabeth mildly concurs but doesn't condemn the use of butter and refers her readers to the à la meunière method elsewhere in her book, but nevertheless concludes the segment by saying:

"I must admit I would never go out of my way either to buy these fish or to order them in a restaurant."

Well I went out of my way today, and I bought farmed trout, so I was, at this point feeling rather flat, though trying to be defiant and muttering that she was a snob.

So I looked for consolation elsewhere but found none with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's crew who waxed lyrical about eating fresh trout caught in a highland stream and fried over wood beside the river. As if.

I was increasingly feeling a person of no taste or acumen when I found Nigel Slater on trout.

"It is all very well for us cookery writers, chefs and other professional piggies to say that if a vegetable, a fruit or a piece of meat is not perfect, then do not buy it, but the truth is that sometimes we must buy the best we can. I mean, have you actually tried to buy a wild, straight-from-the-rod rainbow trout recently? If you have succeeded, then I am deeply envious"

Well I probably would be too if I had ever tasted it - I don't think I have and probably never will. I'm pretty sure virtually all of the trout you get here is farmed, though I'm also pretty sure that there are trout in some rivers. Certainly in New Zealand you can go fishing for trout, but never having been interested in fishing I don't know whether you can here.

Nigel Slater had a couple of other points of difference with Jean Giono too.

"Those who seek to impose olive oil on the oilier fish (ie, almost every restaurant in town) seem to have misunderstood that its flesh is already awash with oil - which is why trout tastes so much better when sizzled in a pan with butter till it turns nutty-smelling and brown."

I am guessing that those from the south of France would not agree and would go with the olive oil. But it is an interesting point though, and one that I shall bear in mind in future with reference to salmon in particular (also farmed).

The main thing according to Nigel Slater is to add some acid.

"You need a snap of piquancy. Throw the cream out of the window and you will eat well enough. Lime, capers, vinegar, lemon grass all have some sort of acidity that, like passion fruit with lacklustre strawberries, breathe life into the dish ...

they will end their days buttered and grilled with a wedge of lemon, or perhaps sitting in a thin, sharp sauce of capers and lime. I am not being unimaginative here: trout is something that doesn't need much of a sendoff - just a hot pan and something tart to make its pink flesh sing."

He concludes his reassuring article with three recipes all of which are worth trying plus some brief descriptions of other ways he has cooked trout.

Delia didn't do trout with almonds at all, but lo and behold, there in Great Dishes of the World, the wonderful Robert Carrier comes up with the goods. He doesn't talk about it, but if he thought it worth including in a book about the world's great dishes, then surely it must be good. His is the recipe I shall use.

4-6 fresh trout

salt and freshly ground black pepper

milk

flour

125g butter

1 tbsp olive oil

4-6 tablespoons blanched slivered almonds

juice 1 lemon

2-4 tablespoons finely chopped parsley.

Season cleaned trout with salt and a little pepper; dip them in milk and then in flour, and sauté fish in half the butter and 1 tablespoon oil until golden brown on both side. Drain the fat from the pan and melt remaining butter. Add blanched slivered almonds and cook, shaking pan continuously, until the almonds are golden brown. Add lemon juice and finely chopped parsley and pour the sauce over trout on a heated platter.

Sounds simple. Mind you I've only got one trout, but I guess that doesn't matter. And yes I deliberately bought some small potatoes to have simply boiled with them and also some broccolini.

"I do think this is a recipe worth doing, though, especially if you take the trouble (and it is trouble) to skin and slice the almonds yourself and use the sweetest, freshest butter." Nigel Slater

Well he can't quite resist being a food snob either can he? My almonds will be ready slivered and peeled out of a jar in my pantry (and therefore probably not that fresh) and the butter will be from the supermarket. And I have to say that I have never found trout to be tasteless. Maybe Australian farmed trout is better than the British.

POSTSCRIPT

This was a complete disaster. Although I thought I had almonds in fact I didn't. Too late to go and buy some, so I used pine nuts instead. The skin was crispy but the fish in the middle was uncooked. The butter was burnt - I mean burnt - as were the pine nuts. The cooked bits tasted alright though - and David cooked his some more in the microwave. What a failure! I must have had the heat too high I think. A little bit more instruction would have been helpful about the heat and the time to cook. An unusual let down from Robert Carrier.