Nose To Tail At Home

Traditionally, piccalilli is a spirited yellow crunchy vegetable pickle.  This salad was created by my sous-chef, Dorothy Harrison.  Not too surprisingly, it goes very well with cold meats or oily fish, as well as being a fine dish eaten by itself.

I’m having a tough time calling this a “recipe”.  It’s just so darn simple to make, it feels like the printer forgot some of the steps.

Having never eaten, or for that matter, even heard of a piccalilli, I went out into the great wide Internet for more information. Wikipedia had exactly what I needed, per usual.

Piccalilli is a relish of chopped pickled vegetables and spices; regional recipes vary considerably.  British piccalilli contains various vegetables and seasonings of mustard and turmeric.  It is used as an accompaniment to foods such as sausages, bacon, eggs, toast, cheese, tomatoes and beer.

That’s a pretty impressive list of food stuffs one could eat the original piccalilli with.  I could see this being my “go-to” salad for near future for it’s sheer straightforwardness and compatibility.

A quick pic of all the needed ingredients.  No, really.  This is it.

The haricot verts-or green beans for us non-french speaking folk-needed to have their tops and tails removed before a quick blanching in heavily salted water.  It turned out that this step took longer than actually assembling the salad!

In less than five minutes, the necessary amount of green beans had properly blanched.  I tried to follow Thomas Keller’s Big-pot blanching technique. Big-pot blanching involves boiling vegetables in brine strength salted water until they are cooked through.  Supposedly the result will be vividly colored, perfectly seasoned vegetables.

The only problem is that I’m a creature of habit, and plunging recently blanched veggies in ice water is almost second nature by now.  I’ll have to try Mr. Keller’s technique again some time without the polar dip.

Next up I needed to peel and thinly slice a red onion. Luckily I had just sharpened my favorite knife…

… meaning razor thin onion slices were a snap to produce. Happiness is a stupidly sharp kitchen knife.

After finishing with the onion, I moved on to the cauliflower.  The biggest of the bunch at the supermarket, I ended up only needing half of it for the salad.  The rest was roasted and enjoyed with dinner the next day.

The part I did use was broken into “generous florets” and set aside.

The last vegetable that needed a little prep work was a single cucumber. Mr. Henderson asks that the pre-pickle be cut into three same sized sections, which are then sliced in half, and finally cut into wedges.

Not my cleanest knife-work, sadly. But I suppose it was close enough. My prep finished, it was time to make the salad dressing.

In my haste to assemble the dressing, I completely forgot to take pictures of the process.  That’s okay though: I’ll just tell you what I did.  First I got out my mini prep food processor.  Then I went hunting for the top for about 10 minutes.  I might have swore a little.  Then I found the top and did a little dance in celebration.  Into the mini prep went a little sugar, a splash of red wine vinegar, some English mustard (Colman’s is my favorite), two cloves of garlic, salt, pepper and almost one cup of extra-virgin olive oil.  One minute of holding down the chop button and the dressing was completed.

Ta-da!

With all of the prep work done, constructing the salad was trivial. To prove my point, I’ll explain how with a haiku.

Combine everything
Include the sweet bright dressing
Don’t forget capers

Ah, that’s right!  I forgot to mention that a handful of briny capers are also called for.  I portioned out the salad in a bowl, and the recipe was completed.

As you might have already figured out, this salad has a lot of crunchy textures to enjoy.  Flavor-wise, expect lightly bitter vegetables mixed with the fiery and sweet mustard dressing.  This is a perfect summer salad, and I recommend combining all of the ingredients and sticking them in your fridge for an hour or two.  Serving it ice cold makes for a refreshing retreat from the summer heat, and the dressing will thicken up slightly, thus providing an optimal coating for the salad.  As Mr. Henderson mentioned in the foreword, this salad begs to be served with oily fish, as the two play extremely well off each other.

One down, fifty three to go.

When Poached and allowed to grow cold, skate sets beautifully into a firm but giving fish whose natural structure shreds perfectly for our salad-making purposes.

Way back in 2008, I made the only other skate recipe in “The Cookbook”, which was Skate, Capers, and Bread.  I’d never worked with or eaten skate before, but the flakey white fish found a home in my heart almost instantly.  Sadly, the common skate has been fished into endangerment, and so I had promised myself that I’d not cook or order skate again after making this recipe.  It’s just a shame that this dish isn’t nearly as captivating as the last one.  I’ll explain at the end of the post.

A quick trip to the supermarket and we had everything we needed to assemble the salad.  First up, a poaching broth for the skate.

In this pan you will find a lot of components.  Let’s see: there is some white wine, a little lemon zest, a whole head of sliced fennel, a sliced onion, two stalks of chopped celery, a bisected head of garlic, a bunch of curly parsley and last but not least, a few scant peppercorns.  Whew!

One of the skate wings we’d bought was just picture perfect.  Excellent color, impeccably skinned, and ultra fresh.  The second skate wing wasn’t as photogenic, but it too was of high quality.

Carefully I slipped the first skate wing into the pan and added just enough water to cover it. The pan was brought up to a up to a boil, and from there down to a simmer. As the skate poached away, my wife and I started working on the anchovy dressing.

Into my mini prep went twenty anchovy fillets, multiple cloves of garlic, a healthy splash of red wine vinegar, a good amount of olive oil and some freshly ground black pepper.  A few pulses later…

…and the dressing was done. It’s amazing how many powerful flavors you can pack together harmoniously.

By this time, the skate had poached enough, but there’s something Mr. Henderson mentions that confuses me. He instructs to check that the flesh comes away from the bone, and I’m just guessing that two times I’ve bought skate that they were pre-boned. Is leaving the bones in skate wings common, or are boneless skate wings the norm?

With the skate done, I turned the heat off and let the pan sit until everything in it had cooled.

After an hour things had dropped in temperature.  The skate wings were slowly pulled out of the poaching liquid and segmented into strips.  They went into a bowl of curly endive, some arugula, a handful of chopped curly parsley and a small amount of capers.  To that I added the industrial strength anchovy dressing, and tossed everything together until it all had an even coating.

A fine looking little salad if you don’t mind me saying so. It was right after the first bite that my heart sank. I’m not sure if I had left the skate in the poaching liquid too long, or maybe I had added too much fennel, but the sweet and delicate flavor of the skate was completely overpowered by the essence of anise. Sure, I’ll throw back a glass or two of Absinthe if the mood strikes me, but even today I’ll leave the black licorice jelly beans for someone else to enjoy. The rest of the salad was nice and peppery, the odd caper here and there adding briny goodness and the always welcome flavor of garlic and anchovies made itself known through the dressing. But it all seemed pointless when the skate didn’t taste like skate.

If you’re a lover of licorice then perhaps this salad is right up your alley. Me? I’m wishing I had cooked the skate in brown butter yet again.

One down, fifty four to go.