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fish will give to the following, traditional French preparation.
    Preheat the oven to 400ºF.
    Using half the butter, grease a baking dish (preferably oval and nice enough to present at table) that will accommodate the trout fairly snugly. Sprinkle the base of the dish with the shallots, then smear the remaining butter over the fish and lay them in the dish. Tuck in 3 or 4 sprigs of tarragon (keep the remainder for later), torn up a bit, and season the trout inside and out. Pour over the Chablis, then tightly cover with kitchen foil and bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, foil intact, and leave to rest for a further 10 minutes.
    Now, lift off the foil and invert it on to a large plate. Flick off any clinging bits of shallot from the trout and carefully lift them onto the foil. Transfer everything left in the baking dish to a saucepan, and clean the dish. Remove the skin and heads from the fish with a small knife and add them to the saucepan. Return the skinned trout to the baking dish and re-cover with foil. Keep warm while you make the sauce.
    Set the saucepan over a moderate heat and allow the sauce to reduce until nearly all the liquid has been driven off and the mixture is syrupy. Add the cream and stir together. Bring to a simmer and cook gently for 20 minutes or so, until the sauce is a nice ivory color.
    Strain through a fine sieve into another pan, pushing down hard on the solids to extract every last vestige of flavor. Taste for seasoning, add a touch of lemon juice and add the leaves from the remaining tarragon, finely chopped. Pour the sauce over the trout and serve with plainly boiled, buttered potatoes.

Tuscan tomato & bread salad (panzanella)
    serves about 8
    As with a salade niçoise (see page 21 ), the assembly for this Italian bread salad is a little bit about taste and balance, both for the maker and for those who enjoy to eat it. So, with this in mind, it would be far better to talk through the recipe rather than give a list of exact ingredients and amounts.
    I have made and eaten plenty of panzanella salads, in the UK and in Italy, too—and once in California, which was, I happily admit, possibly the best of all; it was the tomatoes that were so very good. And that, apart from the bread, is what this salad is all about. There really is no point in making it unless the tomatoes are of fine quality and ripe, ripe, ripe. Some insist that the only ingredients for a panzanella are bread and tomatoes, with just a sprightly seasoning of garlic, basil, vinegar and olive oil and nothing else. The simple Tuscan bread and tomato soup, “pappa pomodoro,” comes to mind as a sloppy, warm version of this salad’s ingredients, in fact. The region, certainly, is common to both.
    Both these dishes rely on bread—and leftover bread, at that. No self-respecting cook would make either the salad or the soup with a specially purchased loaf. Each is a peasant assembly; a seasonally filling dish for when there is a regular stale ingredient mixed with a seasonal glut of the other. This, however, does not mean that a panzanella salad cannot be a gastronomic treat. Just don’t be tempted to fuss too much over the thing.
    Personally, I love
cucumber
in mine, as well as some thinly sliced
red onions
(the only time I ever use them), preferring sweet white onions most of the time. I peel my cucumber because I find the skin intrusive, here (use the skin in a pre-lunch Pimm’s, as it is here that it is most useful, strong and pretty in the glass). Cut the cucumber into small chunks, not dice, and set aside in a large, deep serving bowl with a little
salt
. Pile the onions on top, together with plenty of
pepper
. Think onemedium cucumber to one small onion, as a rough ratio. Now, for the staples … As with cucumber, I like to slip the skins off the
tomatoes
(pop in boiling water for a few seconds), then cut them into slightly larger pieces than the cucumber. Allow about double the weight of tomatoes to cucumber.