Rockling in cream sauce with peppercorns.

In Martin Boyd's 1969 novel The Tea-Time of Love one of the characters, a Brigadier Cheston, describes a favourite fish recipe:

    'There's a very good way of cooking haddock in cream,' (the brigadier) was saying, 'but a bit expensive nowadays. You put sliced tomatoes in a baking dish with some peppercorns and a bay leaf. Lay the haddock fillets on that, pour cream over the lot, and give it a quarter-of-an-hour in the oven.'

    Boyd's novel is set in the immediate post-war period of food shortages and the expense the brigadier refers to is not the fish but the cream: such luxuries were often not available. 

    I tried the recipe. Rather than haddock which is not available here I used rockling, a mild-flavoured white fish which holds its shape well and flakes away into ideal fork-friendly pieces when cooked. 

    Lining the base of a casserole with fresh thinly sliced truss tomatoes, I placed the fish - probably almost a kilogram - on top and threw in a flat teaspoonful of black peppercorns. Not having a bay leaf, I used instead one of those 1980s culinary relics, a bouquet garni, and then poured a container of thickened cream over the top. I covered the baking dish with foil and put it into the oven for forty-five minutes. 

    It was sublime. One of the family, having never seen a bouquet garni, saw it lurking under the cream sauce when all the fish was gone and thought I'd dropped a tea-bag into the baking dish.

    The remnant sauce was a revelation with pasta the next day. The light, creamy sauce, redolent with the mild fishiness of the rockling clung to fresh gnocchi which had been rolled in a little melted butter, dusted with finely grated parmesan and scattered with chopped parsley.

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The Tea-Time of Love by Martin Boyd 

Geoffrey Bles Publishing, London 1969

    (Footnote: Boyd's intended title, The Clarification of Miss Stilby, became its sub-title after being rejected by the publisher who insisted on The Tea-Time of Love, possibly referring the author back to one of his earlier works, Outbreak of Love, and suggesting some kind of potential reader recognition, even though there was no serial connection between the two.)