A pie for the posh and poor

JAMIE OLIVER puts boiled eggs and double cream in his; Marco Pierre White laces his with white wine, vermouth and mussels; Richard Corrigan uses smoked haddock and adds garlic, mustard and chives; Rick Stein includes prawns, leeks and peppercorns. Welcome to fish pie - one of Britain’s most venerable and adaptable dishes.

It’s a pub grub staple, but it’s also on the menu at posh London restaurants like Bentley’s, Langan’s and Hawksmoor. It began life as a dish for the poor - a way of eking out a few fish scraps with cheap ingredients like milk and potatoes, but now ‘luxury’ fish pie is a thing. And whether you eat it in a top London restaurant or at the local pub, it really is the ultimate comfort food.

As it happens, it’s also one of the dishes I use to determine the worth of a gastro pub or restaurant. Because it is so adaptable, a chef has to make delicate and often telling choices in the creation of a fish pie. Too much smoked fish can overwhelm the dish, too much salmon can make it wooly in the mouth, too little variety in the type of fish can make it bland. Do you add boiled eggs? Do you cook the fish in milk, with which you later make a roux for the sauce, or do you use double cream? Do you add herbs or, heaven forfend, capers? Do you layer sliced potatoes on top like a gratin? Or do you pipe pureed potatoes into a lattice? Or do you, as they apparently do at J Sheekey’s in London, top it with breadcrumbs and Parmesan?

To my mind, the best fish pie is served piping hot with bubbling grilled cheese on top of creamy mashed potatoes and a fishy sauce with just a hint of mustard. I like variety in the filling: a cube of salmon, a cube of smoked haddock, a few prawns, and plenty of white fish. I’ve never had it with mussels, but I guess that would work too.

All three fish pies in the image above were good, but if I were to rank them in order it would be: 1. The Middle House. 2. The Camden Arms. And 3. The Mount Edgcumbe (which only came third because it was a relatively small portion - the fish pie itself was excellent).

My all-time favourite used to be the fish pie at Scotts of Mayfair before it was sold in 2006. It grieves me to find that is not on today’s menu. I’ll have to go to Langan’s instead, which has a fish pie at the luxury price of £33 - but it does have the lot: salmon, haddock, cod, scallop, prawns and mussels. Now that’s a pie and a half.