Miles Collins

Alsace meets the Sea…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, meat and fish combos are the way to go. My French pastry chef looked at me as though I had a chicken on my head when I came up with this one but changed his mind when he stuck it down his gullet!

Choucroute in France, Sauerkraut in Germany it’s a fabulous cabbage dish usally cooked with chunks of boiled potato and some good quality smoky sausage. I find the French version more buttery and less acidic than the German one but I was brought up on the German version. We ate it every day, it’s all we could afford, sometimes we might find a piece of potato which my brother and I would fight savagely for. That potato would have to sustain us for the rest of the week My brother was bigger than me so I ended up with the soilitary juniper berry to chew on or, if I was lucky a bay leaf….

Where was I? (drying away a tear) Oh yes, cabbage! So if you’re in the Alsace vicinity then a big pile of steaming pickled cabbage is the plat de jour and it’s worth a try. One of my chefs is from the Alsace and thinking about that and my peasant upbringing I wanted to feature it on the February menu. Monkfish is a great fish to pair with meaty flavours and here I ‘dust’ the fish with finely ground dried porcini to give it an earthy, rustic flavour.

The potato is cooked seperately in goose fat and slices of smky, garlicky French morteau sausage are gently heated through in a reduction of fresh brown chicken stock. The sauce is thickened with a compound butter of fresh herbs, capers and a touch of lemon. Cooked clams go in at the last moment to give another texture and provide a touch of salt. The fish is browned in a hot pan and roasted until just cooked before sitting on a pile of the fabulous cabbage.

I don’t make my own sauerkraut, it involves pressing the cabbage for days, putting up with a quite incredible smell and not tasting as nice as the proper article easily avaliable. If you can’t get monkfish then try some farmed cod or other thick fleshed fish local to where you are. If you cook the fish correctly you end up with a very nice, most dish and the flavours go suprisingly well together.