Name: Stargazy Pie
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: British
Ingredients: 250 ml fish stock (or a corner of a good-quality fish stock cube dissolved in that amount of hot water); ½ tablespoon flour, plus more for dusting; 6 pilchards, herrings or small mackerel, filleted, any residual bones removed and heads reserved; 1 egg, beaten; 300 ml double cream; salt and freshly ground black pepper; 2 tablespoons chopped parsley; 3 tablespoons dry white wine; 200 g puff pastry, rolled out to a thickness of about 3mm; good knob of butter; 2 hard-boiled eggs, shelled and chopped; 3 rashers of rindless streaky bacon, chopped into rough 5mm dice; 1 onion, finely chopped

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

British Regional Food

By Mark Hix

Published 2006

About

You don’t often see this on restaurant menus, and you are possibly not likely to ... Imagine putting a pie in front of a guest with fish heads staring back up at him. The logic of the highly eccentric arrangement of the fish in this dish lies in preserving as much of the essential oils in the pilchards as possible; to this end, the heads are kept and the fish arranged so that their oils run back into the pie filling as it cooks.

In Mousehole (pronounced ‘mowzol’), near Penzance, a f