Journée excellente à l’école aujourd’hui; Filets de Rouget, sauce bonne femme avec légumes glacés à blanc. And you know what, I’ve just realised I thought and typed all that in French. I see Wendy once every week or so and chat with my mother every couple of weeks, but normally I just don’t speak English at all. I’m losing the habit; I’ll be wearing a beret and stripey shirt next.
Anyway. Good day at school, as above. The English is about the same, come to look at it. We were due to be doing Merlan but they didn’t have any, unfortunately, so we got rougets (the cheap kind, not the ‘de rochers’ type Chef buys at the restaurant – check to see if they have pointy noses – if they do, they’re the cheap ones, you want the good rock-dwelling kind).
On average I do about a hundred rougets a month, so cleaning and filetting 10 today wasn’t much of a hardship, really. We were supposed to do three or four each, but school Chef knows I know how to do fish so he gives me all the extra left-over ones to do. Which I enjoy doing anyway, so that’s fine and I’m pleased he has confidence in me to make me do them.
Sauce Bonne Femme is made with a réduction à glacé of the fumet de poisson we made with the bones and a handful of onions, shallots, leeks, vegetable trimmings and whatever you can scrape from under you knuckles. A glacé means reducing the cooking fluid (after cooking the fillets in the oven) down to a syrupy consistency, then monté it au beurre – stir in lots and lots of butter (a hundred grammes in about 50 ccs of fumet).
Today, though, was the first time we’ve had to present our work on a plate to Chef, and I’m extremely pleased to have got great marks for everything except for my courgettes, which apparently didn’t have enough salt in them. Chef is a demon for salt, however, and ‘enough’ for him is ‘blerk!’ for normal people, so I’m not too worried about that; still, know your client and cook accordingly. He marked us + or – on seven criteria – overall presentation, cleanliness of the plate (ha! I was the only person who thought to wash their provided plate before serving, and then to heat it up in the oven), warmth of the dish, taste of the fish, sauce and vegetables. I got a + in everything except the courgettes, which he marked as +-, and the overall presentation which got a double ++ as the most original of the day. Cool. I served it with the two fillets back-to-back in the middle of the plate, vertically, with the veg (two each of three veg – carrots, turnips and courgettes) arranged along the sides like rays of sunshine, the sauce at either end but not between the veg, then a long line of chopped parsley dribbled vertically up the plate and right over the edges. Looked nice I thought, anyway, and so did Chef. We’re supposed to go for height, too, but I’m really not into building towers and propping fish fillets up with bits of turnip. Still, know your client.