Name: San Pietro in Salsa (John Dory in a Balsamic Vinegar Sauce)
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: Freshly ground black pepper; 1 celery rib, roughly chopped; ½ teaspoon salt; Sea salt; 5 black peppercorns; 1 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley; 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil; 2 pounds John Dory fillets or fillets of cod, haddock, scrod, petrale, or whole trout; 1 onion, quartered; 1 carrot, roughly chopped; 2 slices of lemon; 2 bay leaves; 4 cups water; 6 tablespoons balsamic vinegar; 4 garlic cloves, peeled; Leafy tops of 2 celery ribs; 8 anchovy fillets under oil, drained and well rinsed and cleaned

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

In Nonna's Kitchen

By Carol Field

Published 1997

About

Pike is the fish traditionally used in this dish when it is made in the countryside around Mantua, but Vanna Corbellani Camerlenghi assures me that when city-dwelling Mantuans can’t get pike, they use delicate white-fleshed San Pietro, John Dory, instead. And a good thing too. Pike are full of tiny bones and are extremely difficult to scale. If John Dory, a saltwater fish, should prove difficult to track down, substitute cod, haddock, or scrod. I’ve even used trout with ver