Les Poissonchats

A long time ago, during what felt like a huge adventure, living my life in a city. My shoes were always neat and clean and my hair wound into a respectable chignon, no stray strands coming loose. I wore black as if in constant mourning but then it was chic, to wear black (what a circus each morning to get the cat hair off my jacket), sometimes I wore red shoes. I went to the office by tramway, then lunch, then office, then maybe go for an apero, tramway back home, pyjamas, a book, sleep. Like so many other people out there, I suppose it is the most common way to live a life nowadays. The most common way for most people yet if you grew up like me, living that common way of life is an adventure. Everything is new! And interesting. That life in the city, between an office and a tiny flat, that life entailed everything outside the life I used to live growing up. Then, halfway through my adventure I figured it would be good for me to walk to work rather than use public transport, in an attempt balance the lack of movement that comes with a life in the city (I never was one for doing sports, sports being all activity that requires wearing specific clothing. “Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes”, that’s E M Forster who says it better than I, also he had it from Thoreau, you see I’m in illustrious company). And then, one morning, on my way to work, tripping down a muddy path in a minuscule park (it was probably too steep to be turned into a building plot, hence it remained a patch of greenery, a little sorry patch of greenery but with a hint of enchantment), mindful not to spoil my impeccably black shoes, a scent hit me. I gasped, as if literally struck, kept my breath while my body searched its olfactory library. Exhaled, inhaled deeply, again held my breath to get hold of the blurry images floating up, images resurfacing from a far far away time. Childhood. Memories of innumerable early spring afternoons in the forest, playing the day away, building houses for dwarfs and fairies, the scent that reliably announced the end of winter, happiness, for enter the eternally yearned for life out of doors. A memory of birdsong and humming things and mother calling me in across the meadow for the third time, I always was late for lunch, too delicious lingering in the dappled light of the ancient beech trees. Wild hair entwined with twigs and leaves, wiping the mud off my shoes while running back to the house through the young grass.

The scent that tricked those vivid images to surface, well, it’s a scent that actually is terribly unromantic and wonderfully profane, its emissary modest yet proliferous: wild garlic. With hindsight, it was one of the many defining moments when it dawned on me that someday I would have to go on, in search for new adventures, that someday I would have to get out of here, lucid nevertheless that endless afternoons spent in a forest probably weren’t a viable alternative to here, yet that there must be something doable in between, confident that many worlds still were waiting for me to discover.

Fast forward to now, a life in an enchanted castle surrounded by forests, forests covered by vast green sheets of wild garlic, it’s (unromantic) scent infusing the very air I breathe. We’ve even got a little patch under the magnolia tree, wild garlic galore, and I do make ample use of it: scrambled eggs with wild garlic, wild garlic capers, wild garlic butter … and of late wild garlic spinach. It’s a corker.

What you’ll need

Serves two

• Extra virgin sunflower seed oil (unrefined oil)
• Two big handful of spring potatoes, called grenailles in France, wash clean but don’t peel
• A handful of wild garlic leaves, brushed clean and finely chopped. Don’t wash them unless you have time to dry them but make sure to pass each leave through your hands to remove any dirt or bad parts.
• An onion, chopped into fine cubes
• A nice pink trout fillet
• Half a lemon
• Ground white pepper and fleur de sel
• 1dl of dry white wine (I use a local chardonnay produced by a friend ours)
• More wild garlic leaves, like three handful, again brushed clean, roughly chopped

How to cook it

Mix the grenailles with a bit of oil and place them in a cast iron pan, cover with a lid and cook for 10 minutes on low temperature.

In the mean time heat a drizzle of oil in a wide frying pan and fry the fillets golden, 30 seconds on the pink side, reduce the heat to medium and then 2-3 minutes on the skin. Drizzle with lemon juice while cooking, season with salt and pepper, deglaze with the wine and let cook for another minute. Let sit in the pan.

When the grenailles are done remove the lid, increase the heat to medium and add the onion, brown on all sides, then add the wild garlic. Take off the heat and let sit.

Transfer the fillets to the plates and keep warm. Put the pan with the wine sauce back on the heat and add the wild garlic, stir while cooking for no more than four minutes.

Arrange all on the plate and serve.

How to eat it

A typical spring dish, that is so healthy, even lent-worthy, given the virtuous properties of the wild garlic and the fish, that it perhaps ought to be balanced with a glass of dry white wine, for example a nice chenin from Loire. And as kiwi-season is not yet completely over, what about a yellow kiwi pavlova for dessert?