Nigel Slater’s grilled mackerel and smoked mackerel pâté recipes

Fresh mackerel catches the flavour of the sea in summer

The fishmonger is laying out his produce on the ice. The counter is his stage, arranged fresh each morning, just as everyone is going to work in the early light. The catch is his cast, we are his audience, watching the sparkling ice with its ever-changing characters. A blue net of mussels; a tumbling pile of prawns in their shells; a rust-red lobe of smoked cod’s roe, and always a fierce fish head, its razor-sharp teeth barred, there to terrorise the kids.

Sometimes there will be whole squid, their tentacles tangled as if to comfort one another, or a cod sliced into soup-friendly pieces. There is often a crate of fat lemons and a box of spiky fingers of samphire. On a good day, there will be mackerel. The most sustainable are those labelled “line-caught”. Set in a soldierly row, each one taut and firm. Fresh mackerel for the grill, smoked for a pâté. The first shimmering silver and blue, the second in shades of gold, black and amber. Mackerel has always been a favourite fish of mine, long before I learned to pick out hake to cook in a shallow dish with a green sauce or halibut to grill as I might a sirloin of beef, its pearlescent flesh holding a shallow pool of almost melted butter and lemon.

Continue reading...

from Recipes | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZyzscW
via IFTTT