A Comforting Lunch for 4

• Fish and porcini pie
• Ice-cream, cherries, flaked almonds and chocolate sauce

Fish pie is not particularly labour-intensive to cook, but it’s hard to get right: if the flour/butter/milk balance is off, the sauce bubbling beneath the blanket of nutmeggy mashed potato can be too runny or too solid. Don’t let nervousness make you scrimp on the milk: it’s better runny than stodgy and even an imperfect fish pie is a delicious one. What’s important is not to make the sauce taste too floury (using 00 flour sees to that) and not to let your desire for something comforting blunt your appetite for seasoning. I added porcini because I’d been given some by my Austrian Aunt Frieda, who was coming for lunch. Perhaps it would be more correct to say Great Aunt; the title is honorific but she’s the generation, was the companion, of my grandmother. She was the matron at my mother and aunts’ boarding school and my grandmother, not I think extraordinarily maternal, was so dreading the school holidays that she asked Matron to stay during them. Over forty years later, she’s still here, an important figure in all our lives. I wanted to use the mushrooms because she’d given them to me. But I also thought they’d add a creaturely muskiness, a depth of tone, to the milkily-sweet fish-scented sauce. They did.