FOOD & DRINK / Jane Grigson's piscine revisions: After 20 years, a book on fish by one of Britain's greatest cookery writers is republished. Michael Bateman celebrates

HOWEVER calmly Jane Grigson began the pursuit of a recipe or a raw ingredient, it would soon become a heady adventure. Picking mushrooms was never about filling a bag with free food but an opportunity to explore moments in art and literature: a poem by Pasternak, perhaps, or the mushroom-hunting parties of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Jane Grigson wrote that in the 'false, airless suspense of forests, where reality is quite driven out by stillness, feelings become magnified, silences deeper - the perfect milieu for a novelist'.

She went on: 'One is isolated, alone, all sense of time goes in the velvet warmth of the young trees. Suddenly some more girolles appear, or the moist brown head of a cep, and without meaning to, I shout aloud.'

Jane Grigson, who died three years ago, was the most scholarly of the new breed of British scholar cooks (Elizabeth David paved the way, and was followed by Grigson, Alan Davidson, Claudia Roden, Anna del Conte, Yang Kit So and others). Her reputation as one of the greatest of all British food writers is already secure, but the publication now of her revised book on fish will be welcomed by her admirers. For this was the book, first published 20 years ago, that she was updating and revising when she died.

While Elizabeth David tended to be remote, and even aloof, Jane Grigson was gregarious and approachable. David admitted to hating the act of writing, Grigson never did. Indeed, David couldn't wait to exchange the hasty pressure of weekly journalism for the academic's slowly-unfolding research work, and once remarked: 'I don't want . . . to end up writing little pieces about how to cook haddock

when I'm 70.'

But Grigson was the opposite, thank goodness, and went on writing about how to cook haddock to the end. This revised book is the result, including not only haddock but cod, coley and crabs, lobsters, oysters, John Dory, monkfish and tuna; swordfish, squid, sea bass and salmon; anchovies, mackerel, bluefish and pompano; perch, zander and fogas (perch from Hungary's Lake Balaton), shark and its smaller sisters tope and porbeagle; eels and elvers.

The chapter on eels and elvers is typical of her writing. Slippery, slimy, squirming black eels may not be suitable for today's bland TV cookery programmes, but for Jane Grigson they were a glorious excuse to set out on a voyage of discovery.

She pursues the eel from its beginning as a tiny larva, like a transparent willow leaf, tracing it, with the Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt, to its breeding grounds in the seaweedy eastern side of the Sargasso Sea. She follows it as it radiates in all directions, eventually providing eel-fare (thus the word elver) for the people of Gloucestershire, swarming up the Severn Estuary in early spring to be caught by lamplight with nets. (You can be sure Jane Grigson is waiting there, too, in her gumboots, ready to claim her bagful.)

The Frampton-on-Severn village garage mechanic, she notes, holds the world record for eating elvers - one pound in a minute. Then she tears off into the eel's history, alighting on the medieval abbeys of Athelney and Glastonbury in Somerset where the monks drained the marshes by making canals which became a paradise for eels. She moves on to Ely (so that's why it's called Ely), where eels still flourish in the wet fens; then to Twickenham Eyot, better known as Eel Pie Island on the Thames, where eels were once taken in the unpolluted river. She uses it as an excuse to resuscitate a recipe from the Victorian best-selling cookery book, Dr William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle, in its day every bit as popular as Mrs Beeton's Household Cookery.

Next, she takes off to Italy for grilled and baked eel (one of the ritual dishes of the

meatless Roman Catholic Christmas Eve dinner) and then to France for the traditional matelote of eel, stopping off at her own French home in Troo, close to eel-full tributaries of the Loir (the lesser relation of the grand Loire), giving a village recipe: matelote d'anguille de Tante Marie.

Born in 1928, Grigson was brought up in the depression-hit shipyard town of Sunderland in the North-east (her father was town clerk). It was to banish her childhood memories of boiled cod, tinned sardines on toast, dull fish pie, the occasional kipper and salmon once or twice a year as a treat, that she wrote a book about fish. When it was first published in 1973, fish played second fiddle to meat, with fishmongers displaying a mere handful of varieties to suit different pockets, perhaps sole, cod, haddock, plaice and herring.

But when BSE (mad cow disease) came along, fish emerged as the healthy option for the Eighties, especially oily fish such as salmon, tuna, mackerel, herring, sardines and anchovies. In addition, more efficient methods of chilling enabled the import of extraordinary specimens - at a price - from the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

Jane Grigson's astonishing output never flagged for 20 years. While writing a regular column in the Observer, she also produced a dozen books. Jane Grigson on Fruit and Jane Grigson on Vegetables each won the Glenfiddich award; The Mushroom Feast was the last word on fungus, and Charcuterie and French Pork Cooking is still the only authoritative work of its kind in English or French.

She had never intended to be a food writer. Her first book, on charcuterie, came about by chance. A graduate in English at Cambridge, she had pursued a career in art, publishing

and translating, when she met and married the literary critic, poet and naturalist Geoffrey Grigson. Retiring with him for three months every year to a holiday home in the quaintly- named village of Troo, built into a cave, she met an eccentric Englishman who had been commissioned to write a book about charcuterie. He enlisted her as a researcher and was so overwhelmed by the quality of her material that he suggested she should take it over.

A year after its publication she launched into her brilliant career.

Grigson's revisions, amounting to two- thirds of the text of Fish, have been supplemented by her editor, Jenny Dereham, using additional recipes and articles published over the years. Most of the recipes have been revised to bring them more into line with modern practice (a little less cream and butter); and she explores areas of interest that did not exist 20 years ago - the eating of very fresh ray fish Japanese fashion (sashimi) or marinated in citrus juices, the South American ceviches.

She once wrote that she would not give a recipe for bouillabaisse since you could never get the right fish here. This is no longer true, although it is probably better to live near Harrods Food Hall than the ocean if you want to buy rascasse and the spiny rockfish which give this Provencal dish its special flavour and glutinous texture.

BOUILLABAISSE

The interesting thing about bouillabaisse is that the fish is removed from the soup, but served with it, and the enrichment is provided by large bowls of ailloli and rouille (see recipes below). The bread is toasted, then fried in olive oil, and finally rubbed with garlic before being put into a basket for the table. As the soup itself doesn't take long to cook, prepare all the accompanying dishes first.

Use the following kinds of fish: monkfish, conger eel, John Dory, weaver, gurnard, crawfish or spiny lobster, Dublin Bay prawns (or mussels if prawns are not available).

Serves 6-8

6-7lb fresh fish

4oz olive oil

2 large onions, chopped

white part of 2 leeks, chopped

4-6 cloves garlic

2 huge tomatoes, peeled and chopped

parsley, fennel

1 small chilli

good pinch of saffron filaments

cayenne pepper, salt

4 potatoes, sliced

5 pints water, warm

12 slices French bread, toasted lightly in the oven,

fried in olive oil and rubbed with garlic

bowl of rouille

bowl of ailloli

Sort out the fish and clean them. Put oil, vegetables (except potatoes), herbs and seasonings into a large pot. Add the thickest fish (conger, monkfish) on top of the vegetables, and top with slices of potato. Pour on the water, bring to the boil and boil hard (this enables the water and oil to thicken together). After 5 minutes add the crawfish. After another 5 minutes add the Dublin Bay prawns and John Dory. After another 5 minutes add the rest of the fish, and the mussels if you are not using Dublin Bay prawns. Boil 4-5 minutes.

Remove fish and potatoes to a hot serving dish, split the crawfish head in two and slice the tail. Prawns and mussels are left in their shells. Taste the soup and correct the seasoning. Boil hard for a few moments, then pour through a strainer into a soup tureen. Serve immediately with the fish and potatoes, bread and sauces.

Serve with a chilled rose from Provence.

For the ailloli: crush 4-8 garlic cloves with a little salt into a bowl, before making mayonnaise in the usual way with 2 egg yolks, adding 10fl oz olive oil drop by drop. Season with lemon juice and pepper.

For the rouille: make this fiery sauce by pounding 2 cloves of garlic and 2 de-seeded small chilli peppers in a mortar. Blend with a thick, crustless slice of white bread, wetted and squeezed dry, with 3 tablespoons olive oil and a little liquid from the soup.

'Jane Grigson on Fish' is published by Michael Joseph at pounds 20.