Simply delicious fish

Back in the early nineties, before Saturday Kitchen and the Food Network, before Neven, Nigel and Nigella, there wasn’t much in the way of decent foodie television on Irish screens. Then along came Darina Allen to change all that with her Simply Delicious series. It’s the first time I remember a cookery show being event television in our house; we’d gather round each week to watch her breeze through a new bread or stew or pie recipe. And, as with the best food shows, we’d always be hungry afterwards.

I’m not sure whether you’d call this a fish pie or a fish crumble, given the breadcrumb topping. I do know, though, that it’s been a staple in my mam’s house – and now in all of or houses – since Darina first made it on Simply Delicious almost twenty years ago, so much so that we now just refer to it as “the fish dish”.

Darina Allen’s fish dish

Ingredients for four servings:

around 750g white fish of your choice, skin off
6 streaky rashers
4 tomatoes
2 small onions
4 slices of bread
sprig of parsley (optional)
a glug of olive oil and a knob of butter

What to do:

Preheat your oven to 200C / 400F / 180C fan.

To make the breadcrumb topping, whizz up the slices of bread and sprig of parsley, with salt and pepper seasoning to taste, in a food processor until good and crumby.

Chop up the rashers into centimetre-long pieces and fry in a glug of olive oil until crisp. Lift them out to drain on some kitchen paper with a slotted spoon, leaving the bacony juices behind.

Finely chop the two onions and fry off in the bacon juices until just starting to colour.

While the onions are frying, skin the tomatoes (this is easiest done by steeping them in boiling water for a couple of minutes first). Finely chop and remove the seeds. Add the chopped tomato flesh to the pan along with the onions and stir through. Add the bacon bits back in and turn off the heat.

Just before assembling the dish, melt a knob of butter in a second pot, and stir the breadcrumb mixture through.

Add the bacon, onion and tomato mixture to your pie dish (a 12″ round one is perfect) first, then lay the fish fillets on top, and season them well. Top with the buttery breadcrumb mixture.

Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes, and serve straight away with green veg or a peppery green salad.