Nautical but nice

03 February 2000
Nautical but nice

It might have won a bucketful of awards and a serious reputation for food, but the Froize Inn at Chillesford, Suffolk, remains a pub at heart. "We always have room for people who just want to have a drink," explains chef-proprietor Alistair Shaw. "We're a pub that does good food, not a restaurant."

The Froize Inn is renowned for its whole menu, but what draws most of its customers are Shaw's fish dishes. This is not a pub that is content with having double-crumbed haddock on its menus, however.

Shaw is a serious fish fan. For him, the freshness and quality of the fish he serves overrides everything else. He scrutinises his suppliers to such a degree that most chefs in London's West End would appear like pussycats in comparison.

He has a tough, yet honest, relationship with his three suppliers: Direct Seafoods in Colchester, Kelly's of Lowestoft, and his friend ["I'm not giving his name away"], who runs a fishing boat out of nearby Orford.

"It's all about getting suppliers who care about what they're selling and who don't try to kid you," says Shaw. "If they know you care about fish, they'll work for you. It isn't about rejecting good fish just because you want to keep the supplier on their toes. That's a stupid attitude for a chef; it builds barriers, not trust. But if the fish isn't right, I won't have it."

Shaw looks for firmness, fresh colour and, above all, sticky slime on the skin as indicators of freshness. Unless it's a busy time, he also asks for fish to be delivered on the bone and, interestingly, for the fishmonger to fillet it in the kitchen, usually with his help.

"It might be one of those chef myths, but I think the flavour is sealed in with a whole fish. When you fillet it, the flavours begin to drift."

His understanding of fish shows in his refusal to follow the widely held belief that all fish tastes better if cooked on the day of capture. Shaw says demersal (sea-bottom feeding) white fish need two or three days for their muscles to relax and the texture to set before cooking, while pelagic (free-swimming) oily fish need to be "stiff alive" to eat well.

Shaw often cooks with Norfolk crabs, but always goes for hen crabs. While cock crabs have larger claws and, therefore, more white meat, he believes there's more body meat and flavour in hen crabs, especially when they are carrying roes.

In summer, when most of the cod caught is still soft after spring spawning, he insists on using those caught over inshore wrecks by rod and line, since these will be firmer through rich feeding on school fish shoaling around the wreck.

He prefers dredged mussels to rope-grown for their flavour, and gets around any barnacle problems by cleaning them in a potato rumbler. You need seaweed under the fingernails to know these kind of tricks.

The recipe for Shaw's signature dish - fish pie - was developed in the 1980s when he was running the kitchen in the King's Head, the pub his family owned in Orford. The dish proved a useful way of controlling food costs by using up fish trimmings.

It's still an imprecise science when it comes to exactly what fish goes into the dish, since it depends on what has been bought that day. Froize fish pies have a basic formula, however: fish, shellfish, velouté sauce anda shortcrust pastry topping (rather than the more common mashed potato covering).

The white fish includes two textures: the lightness of cod or haddock; and the more dense texture of fish such as halibut or turbot.

The shellfish will include prawns, but Shaw prefers to shuck frozen shell-on prawns to ensure a concentrated texture and flavour rather than using ready-peeled frozen prawns. Luxuries could include a few wisps of lobster trimmings, fresh-steamed mussels, queenie corals or a full scallop.

Each pie is made to order in the kitchen to ensure absolute freshness, but there is plenty of prep work done ahead to speed things up. Fish is pre-portioned, the velouté sauce made earlier in the day, and pastry toppings are ready to bake-off.

All fish and shellfish is steamed in a pressure steamer, rather than being poached, to concentrate the flavour and prevent the sauce being thinned by water leeching out of the fish and causing the pastry to go soggy.

While food sales are the mainstay of the Froize Inn, Shaw has developed a steady sideline in cookery classes held during Thursday daytimes. There are a maximum of six students to a class and the day costs £55 (which includes lunch as well as tuition).

Another revenue earner are the two en suite rooms priced at a fixed rate of £55 per double room, and they are nearly always full at weekends, increasingly with customers from inside the M25.

Shaw has also written a book of recipes from the Froize Inn. Flair For Fish, due to be published at Easter by Tiptree Press, is described by its author as a recipe book of pub food, not aspirational dishes. "It's the food we do here. That's what people expect from a book about the Froize."

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