Name: Monkfish with Celery à la Grècque
Cuisine: United Kingdom
Ingredients: 1 glass dry white wine; ½ tsp fennel seeds; 70 ml olive oil; 2 tbsp sliced shallots or red onions; 6 good-sized parsley stalks; 300 ml water; chopped leaves from a head of celery; 1 sprig fresh thyme or ¼ tsp dried; 2 tbsp chopped herbs – basil, chervil, tarragon, chives, dill, fennel; 1 ripe firm tomato, skinned, seeded and roughly chopped; 4 monkfish fillets, each weighing about 120g, each sliced across the grain into 4; 12 peppercorns; 15 coriander seeds; 4 inside celery sticks, halved across; juice of ½ a lemon; ½ tsp salt

Preparation info

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Classic Bull

By Stephen Bull

Published 2001

About

Although vegetables à la grècque are usually eaten cold or as a salad, I think they are just as good hot, and a pairing with a meaty fish cooked in the same court bouillon makes a light, uncloying main course. Vegetables with a pronounced flavour are best given this treatment – artichokes, mushrooms, onions, and celery. The more or less unthickened sauce (just some tomato pulp) works much better with a firm-fleshed beast like monkfish – a kind of shark, an evolutionary link between the shar