Britain and Ireland · Volume 31, The Roast, the Crust and the Clotted Cream
Stargazy Pie
Cornwall
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Researched
- 9 sources cited
Printed references to a pie of small whole fish, heads left in, go back to at least 1846, predating by decades the popular story now attached to it, that a fisherman named Tom Bawcock single-handedly saved the village of Mousehole from famine during a sixteenth-century storm. That specific legend has no source earlier than 1927, a folklore magazine article by Robert Morton Nance describing a celebration as it stood at the turn of the twentieth century, not a documented sixteenth-century event; the now-famous modern festival is traceable to a 1950s revival by a Mousehole pub landlord. The dish is real and old. The story explaining it is not.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1.5 hours.
Ingredients
- 8 small whole fish (pilchard, sardine or mackerel), gutted, heads left on
- 400g potato, boiled and sliced
- 2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced
- 1 a small onion, finely chopped
- 200ml white sauce (béchamel, made from butter, flour and milk)
- as needed shortcrust pastry, for the lid
- to taste salt, pepper, a squeeze of lemon
Method
- Line a pie dish with the sliced boiled potato, scatter with the chopped onion and sliced egg.
- Arrange the whole fish, heads toward the rim, radiating outward across the dish.
- Pour over the white sauce, season with salt and pepper, and add a squeeze of lemon.
- Roll the pastry to fit, and cut holes so each fish head pokes through the crust before it is laid over and sealed at the edges.
- Bake at 190°C for 30 to 35 minutes, until the pastry is golden and the fish just cooked through.
What a modern chef changes
The same raw-fill logic as the pasty above, applied to a whole small fish rather than diced meat and vegetable.
Rung 3, applied by analogy
Method
- Choose whole fish of genuinely even size, so each one reaches doneness at the same moment as its neighbours under one shared pastry lid, the same cooking-time-parity discipline the pasty above is built on.
- Build a properly made béchamel, cooked out for a full two to three minutes before the milk is fully added, rather than a thin, under-cooked sauce, since a raw-flour-tasting sauce is one of the more common failures of this dish in a home kitchen.
- Judge doneness by the fish's own eye and flesh at the crust's opening, not by the pastry's colour alone, since the pastry can brown well before the fish beneath it is properly cooked through.