Commonplaces: Novelties gastronomiques

The title of this blog is a deliberate mix of English and French, to reflect the nature of the subject -- last night's feast (see the menu, left).

I'm back from my travels, and I'm beginning to work my way through a backlog of sibling blogs; but while I'm doing this, I thought I'd tell you about my day yesterday, which was about as unique and as enjoyable as a day can get.

Laura, Julie's cousin (so, kind of my cousin-in-law), needed to be distracted, so we planned to meet up in the afternoon. I decided that the best form of distraction would be to try to cook something extraordinarily difficult involving fish - complicated because I wanted it to be a proper distraction, and fish because I hardly ever cook fish, and I need to learn how to do basic things, like make fresh 'fish fumet' (see - an example of a phrase which uses both English and French), which shows up in almost every single French recipe involving seafood. So I spent the hour before we met up poring over The Silver Spoon (thanks Ben and Jules! but too easy) and Larousse Gastronomique. The latter cookbook is full of recipes which look easy, but which aren't, because each recipe cross refers to a billion other recipes ('poach X using a fish fumet, white wine and the juice of half a lemon, and use the reserved liquid to prepare a simple Mornay sauce' ... 'for Mornay add X, Y and Z to a bechamel' ... 'for bechamel prepare a white roux' ... 'for fish fumet, just take 5 lbs of fish heads and bones' ... anyway, you get the picture).

So I selected a fish recipe called 'fillets of John Dory Palais-Royal' because I've never cooked John Dory, and it involved all of these sauces made from other sauces.

So Laura came over to Borough at 1 pm and we went shopping at the market near me. This market is enormous, and is easily the best all-round food market in London, and it's a 7 minute walk from my flat. You can get just about anything you could possibly want. As we wandered around the market, our plans morphed so that by four pm we were planning a very posh 4-course dinner with 3 different types of wine. Laura begged me not to buy the fish heads (she was worried about getting fish eyes in her Mornay sauce), but the fishmonger was only too happy to hand over a pile of fish carcasses to us for fresh stock. How could I refuse?

We made the fish stock and then went to the pub for good measure, where a sort of blues-y, dixie band was rehearsing for the evening.

We came back and started cooking properly at about 6:30, I think, and finished at about midnight.

Here is the meal in pictures: