Grilled Skate with Sauce Gribiche

Skate is a member of the ray family a delicious but largely unappreciated fish characterized by its fan oi gelatinous bones on which the sweet white flesh resides in pretty scalloped steaks – making it easy to fillet into neat portions. It is mostly eaten in the south of England, battered with chips, and is hardly eaten at all in the north of the country and Scotland.

There is an odd and enduring piece of received wisdom about skate, that when very fresh the fish smells of ammonia.