This was a very good decision. I ordered some sea bass from Waitrose, determined to cook myself some lovely fish even though I hadn't chosen a recipe and wasn't sure whether I had any suitable ingredients at home. I just knew I liked sea bass, and thought I'd work something out when I was hungry enough.
There were some surprises along the way. The first one was the price - £5.99 seemed like a lot for two measly fillets of fish. The second one was the fact that it was imported from Greece. Why would you need to fly fish around the world when you live on an island? Nevertheless, I was prepared to forgive my finned friend everything when I opened the packet and discovered that it was neither smelly nor slimy. A first! A fish that looked as though it might have actually been sweeping through clear Cycladic waters as late as, ahem, yesterday morning. Okay, probably not, but I was impressed.
To me, fish pie sounds like an unlikely dish. Accustomed to thinking of pie as a dessert - apple pie, cherry pie, banoffee pie - I don't think that the concept of fish in a pie is immediately appealing. Even after becoming reasonably assimilated and enjoying English dishes such as steak and mushroom pie, the idea of fish and pastry seems hideous and altogether wrong.
Luckily, fish pie involves no pastry. It belongs to a different branch of the pie family (along with its cousins cottage and shepherd's pie), which means that we are talking about a layer of fish and vegetables under a golden blanket of floury, mashed potatoes.
When I was growing up, my family ate fish once or twice a week. Living by the Baltic sea, it was the easiest and most natural thing in the world. Tuesday and Saturday mornings my parents would go to the market and pick up some freshly caught fish, which we would cook and eat the same day.
It was usually perch, pike-perch or whitefish. Occasionally herring, but it was a little too fiddly for my taste. When I was very young and the Baltic was colder and slightly saltier, we often caught our own cod on long, cold fishing trips where we kept warm by drinking hot chocolate out of a flask. My grandfather fished with nets and brought home dozens of flat, brown delicious flounders which my mother and grandmother would gut and scale in the garden while I wandered around, eating redcurrants off the shrubs.
