Great Fish Recipe but......

Here in Columbia we are lucky to have a great Saturday market that is only a few minutes from our house. It is called the All Local Farmers Market and it is open Saturday from 9:00 to 12:00. Besides great fresh produce, they have a wonderful seafood vendor that come from Beaufort, SC. All the fish is local caught (except the scallops and salmon). Recently they have had a wonderful type of snapper called Hognose snapper. It is a mild all white fish that is delicious.

I bought a beautiful fillet on Saturday and was discussing with good friend and neighbor Joe Blanchard how we should fix it for Sunday dinner. A native of Tampa, there is a famous restaurant called Columbia that has a well known snapper dish called Snapper Alicante.

I'm not going to copy the recipe here as you can grab it on the Internet by simply googling snapper alicante. Although the recipe calls for red snapper and I had the milder cousin, it still worked great.

However!!!!

There is one hitch. The Columbia Restaurant cookbook calls for using 1/2 cup of brown sauce. The web site recipe calls for brown beef stock gravy. Now.....I know what brown sauce is but I'm not sure what brown beef stock gravy is. I'm assuming like you, it is some kind of beef gravy you conjure up using beef stock.

I don't care.......don't do it......please use brown sauce!! This is what makes this dish great!

The reason you want the brown sauce is the flavors are so much more complex then simple gravy. The problem is finding it. Brown Sauce is one of the "mother sauces" of french cuisine and is the base for a number of highly refined french sauces such as Marchand de Vin. You can find it online or find it at local gourmet shops. However, it is NOT hard to make and it FREEZES beautifully.

In previous posts, I've mentioned the Plantation Cookbook from the New Orleans Junior League. First published in 1972, it is still one of my go to cookbooks even though half of it is about Louisiana plantations. It is their recipe I use to make my Brown Sauce

You can buy the book at Amazon and other places but I hope you will buy it from Garden District Book shop in New Orleans. This great local institution picked up publishing the book when it went out of print. So if you want it.....please buy it from them: http://www.gardendistrictbookshop.com/

Regardless of whether you use this recipe or not, you are doing yourself and this dish a disservice if you opt for gravy over the brown sauce.

It is inspired. How many different ways could you think to poach fish before you would think of using a beef based sauce?

So here it is.....served with blanched asparagus sauteed in olive oil and tarragon. We also had a salad of heirloom tomatoes and avocado.

The fish, poached in the brown sauce mixed with a white spanish wine (albarino) on a bed of onions and topped with red and green peppers was simply fabulous. Make sure you have some good crusty bread to mop up the sauce!



What did we drink with it??

Even though we cook it in a beef based sauce, the dish is way to delicate for a red wine. Joe brought a 1992 rioja and it was still too big a wine for the meal.

I came to the rescue with a 2006 Grand Cru Cablis from Simonnet Febvre that worked just great.

On a personal note......in my first post in May of last year, I told you all that my mother was a great cook and the person who inspired me to cook. Over the years we continued to share recipes and when I would visit her in New Orleans, I always cooked for her getting a loving dose of "critique" on the side.

My mother passed away almost two months ago in May. She was 86. Her cookbooks are crammed with personal notes and marked through with changes to recipes. I've got a lot of cooking to do to get through them.

I never fixed this recipe for her. She would have loved it.

So here is a "tip of the glass" to my mother, Sue Menge. She was a real character and a hell of a cook!

Sue Menge

1925-2012