One of my favourite bits in Breaking Bad is when
Walt White is smuggled away by Saul’s guy, who specialises in creating new
identities for people who have worn out their own, to live the rest of his life
in the coldest, remotest cabin in New Hampshire.
As the man said, no phone, no internet, no television.
He had a wood stove, a month’s worth of tinned food and a winter’s worth of
snow. The fixer shows him round the cabin, then points at the log-burning
stove and says: “You can cook in there as well.”
It hit a note with me. The getting
back to basics thing. Rediscovery of the ancient skills of cooking over wood. I’ve
got a wood stove in the cottage I live in, and although I can’t pretend it’s as
cold as Walt’s cabin, I bet it runs a close second.
In fact, as I have no TV either, one of my main
pleasures is warming my toes in front of the fire, with a whisky in my hand,
while watching the flames licking away at the wood (Caveman TV, if you will). Then
I make another foray into the darkness of the slowworm-infested garden and reach
for the logs and frozen snakes to keep the happy hearth belching its wonderful
rays of pale warm.
I sleep in front of the stove some nights, and
wake to find cold ash where warmth once lay, and a crick in my neck and cold-numb
head from frozen cider. Over the months, I’ve become quite an expert at the
fire-burning qualities of beech or oak, and lighting techniques and how many
bricks to put in there to retain the heat, and how much to turn the air-inflow
knobs to get the embers toasty, without burning through my log collection
before the once-a-month supply drop from Saul’s guy, and when to risk a log
from the apple tree that died this summer and hasn’t had time to dry.
But one thing I haven’t really tried is cooking in
there. My first experience was roasting a fine piece of beef with disastrous
results. And I’ll say no more than that. Aside from that, I’ve cooked in a
wood-burning pizza oven a friend made. He’d made the thing out of special
cement and fire bricks, designed at such an angle that the smoke was kept a few
inches off the dough, and so strong a heat that a pizza took barely three
minutes. The method was simple enough - just burn a load of
logs and once they were embers sweep them into the far corner, and then put the
pizza on the red-hot bricks.
I’m trying the same in my stove as I write, burning
down five or six sizeable apple and beech logs until they’re reduced to orange
coals, and then cooking the smoked haddock pie I’d made earlier.
I was going to cook it in the oven, and heaven
knows now it would have been a lot quicker, but I suddenly had a moment of
inspiration and thought about Walt’s stove for some reason. And I must admit
there’s a lot more skill to this than I first thought. You can’t just buy an RV
and drive into the desert, and say: “Let’s cook.” There’s a skill to cooking on
a wood stove. This ain’t chemistry - this is art, as they say.
As I sit here writing, I can hear the faint sizzle
of roasting pie, but only the faintest, and it’s already been in there an hour.
I’ve raked up the embers but now I can barely hear a thing. I’ll check again.
I’ve got to say, it’s a bit of a disaster. The tomatoes
on top are barely singed and although the mashed potato top is warmer than it
was in the fridge, it barely counts for cooked.
I’ve given the ashes another rake, but next time
I’ll definitely start with hotter embers. I could put a couple of small logs on
now, and hope they catch, but even if they do they’ll produce flame - which I’m
told is not what you want when cooking over wood otherwise the whole thing will
just taste of smoke.
Of course, If I’d cooked the fish first I’d
probably just eat it now, hungry as I am. But I put the pieces in raw, which is
always the best thing to do with a fish pie, so I’m afraid that by digging in,
all I’ll find is escabeche.
I’ll give it another five minutes and if the
embers haven’t worked their magic by then, I’ll warm up the oven and go back to
traditional means...
So anyway back to the pie, which is originally
what I was supposed to be writing about, until I got side-tracked by the stupid
idea of cooking in the wood stove.
I worked in a small-windowed kitchen above a deli
for a year or so, making the sort of wages that a modern day slave would be
proud of, and I can’t tell you how many fish pies I prepped. People used to
bring their own dishes in so they could pass them off on their own.
It was a dreadful recipe - lovely if you like that
sort of thing I suppose, but dreadful if you’re cooking it. And far too rich
for me. I’d fillet a huge cod delivered by a racist from Billingsgate Market,
then cook a white sauce with onions, white wine and buckets of cream, and then
throw in prawns the size of a baby’s fist and chunks of smoked haddock. Then top
it all with mashed potato that contained a few blocks of butter and more cream.
Then I’d decorate it with grated Davidstow cheddar.
The owner said he followed the Italian school of
thought when it comes to fish and cheese and said they should never be served
together, but he made an exception for that fish pie. It was rich, creamy and
dreary.
This is the exact opposite of that recipe. I suppose
once upon a time you could have quite rightly, and without a shade of
hypocrisy, called it pauper’s smoked fish pie, but what with the price of fish
these days...
What I really mean is, it’s simple, Simple in the
extreme. Just the most basic flavours lovingly put together to make that most
wonderful of comfort foods - a rip-roaring, bubbling fish pie straight from the
oven - or at least it would have been if I hadn’t buggered up the stove.
I’m going to check again. A faint sizzle. I’d be better off holding it over a
cigarette. There’s one ember left, and the pie could be described as warm at
best.
There’s nothing for it, but to put the oven on,
and finish it off using lovely Russian gas. But if you’ve got better wood-burning
skills than me, and if you’ve ever lit a fire properly, then no doubt you’ll
have better luck.
SMOKED HADDOCK PIE
(Serves 2 with seconds)
4 large potatoes
300g smoked haddock
2 medium onions
2 garlic cloves
Salt, Pepper
Large knob of butter
3 level dessertspoons of flour
Milk
1 tomato
I tbsp chopped parsley
1 teaspoon mustard
Peel the potatoes, dice, and boil in a saucepan for
20 minutes or so until cooked. Then mash while hot with a bit of the potato
water and a splash of milk.
Meanwhile, chop the onions and garlic finely. Melt
the butter in a pan and gently fry the onions and garlic for about five minutes
until they are soft. Add the flour, and over a low flame, stir for a minute
until the mixture has become a paste.
Then add a ladle of the boiling water from the
potatoes, mix well, then add another ladle until the mixture has loosened. Then
add half a pint or so of milk, a little at a time, stirring all the time, until
you have a fairly thick custard consistency.
Add the mustard, and salt and pepper to taste.
Remember to slightly underseason it with salt as the salt from the smoked
haddock will also add flavour. Turn the heat off and add the peas and the broad
beans. Then chop up the parsley and add to the sauce.
Skin the haddock fillet, running a sharp filleting
knife from the tail to the top, at a slight angle to the board, and slice the
fish into one inch or so pieces. Get a pie dish - about 10 inches across or so
- and fill with the sauce. Decorate the sauce evenly with the smoked haddock
pieces. Then top with the mashed potato. Slice the tomato and decorate the top,
then sprinkle with pepper.
Put in the wood stove for an indeterminable amount
of time, or cook for 40 minutes in an oven at 180C.
