Today I will share a recipe with you. Francine Segan produced this marvelous cookery book titled: “Shakespeare’s Kitchen – Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook”. We cooked from this book the most wonderful fish.
Red snapper with Caviar is the dish called.
From the outset I have to admit that our supermarket had only sea-bass on offer and instead of caviar we had to be content with ordinary fish roe. Indeed, Francine remarks that the original recipe was based on roe, not caviar, which was not well understood in Shakespearean times.
Ingredients:
– 4 small red snapper or trout with head on
– 1/4 cup of extra-virgin olive oil
– salt and freshly milled black pepper
– 12 dates, minced
– 1/4 cup finely grated fresh ginger (cam from my own production on my terrace garden)
– 8 ounces of caviar or roe
– 8 ounces fresh red currant or barberries
– 1 table spoon sugar
– 2 table spoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
How it’s done:
– Preheat the grill, brush the fish inside and outside with the olive oil, season with salt and pepper, combine the dates with the ginger and gently fold into the caviar/roe, spoon the mixture into the cavity of the fish, grill of about 405 minutes on each side until the flesh is firm
– Place currant, sugar and lemon juice in a saucepan, simmer for about 10 minutes until thickened, puree until smooth
– Place the fish on a plate and serve the sauce in a small dish next to it. Finished. Enjoy.
And this is what the dish may look like:
Sea-bass
Beautiful roe
The side dishes came also from the same cooking book. They were sweat onions (six different kinds of onions) and artichokes in vinegar with herbs.
The sweat onions
Artichokes
The wine we had with the food was not Shakespearean. Instead, we had a very simple wine with it, a ‘Frascati superiore’ from Rione. Ever since we lived in Rome about 20 years ago, I love the young white wines from Frascati,especially on hot days, the wines are refreshing and uplifting. It was a good complement to the “heavy” Shakespearean food.
The Man from Mosel River 