Matelote à la Bourguignonne

Fish and wine have always seemed to me to have natural affinities . . . ever since the memorable summer of ’31 when I was eight, my favourite brother was fourteen, and we lived on the banks of the Hudson River just twenty-five miles from New York. It was Prohibition – a zany period in American political history, when to indulge in a quiet drink between friends was punishable by law – and my brother and I spent the summer ‘fishing’ along with other members of the local citizenry for cases of champagne and caviare hastily thrown overboard one evening by a boatload of bootleggers temporarily at grips with the law.