Chances are when you think of winter comfort food, steak pie and mash potato spring to mind. Shredded fish bound in egg white and steamed... not so much.

I'm starting to get the impression that 100 years ago, snacking wasn't really 'a thing'. Of all my Forgotten Recipes, none have really been the quickest or the easiest to prepare in a hurry (and when I say hurry I mean when the midnight munchies kick in). There's also the small issue of the recipes not really looking too delicious, and this week's recipe, steamed fish pudding, definitely falls into that category.

As the king of snacking (homemade sausage rolls with onion chutney baked in, five cheese fondue started at 1am, a chocolate digestive massacre - you name it, I've done it) I've come to hold this non-meal meal in high regard. I have a theory when it comes to cooking that the effort to yield ratio has to be directly proportional to the taste. So if a slow-cooked stew with herby dumplings takes four hours to prepare and finish but it's amazing, then great. If a sticky toffee pudding can be blasted in the microwave and ready in two minutes and tastes disgusting, then I'll stick with the stew. But sometimes the nemesis of cooking presents itself - the slow-cooked snack that takes ages but tastes and looks terrible. This is exactly what this week's recipe is all about.

Steamed fish pudding shows all the signs of ending well - the three words are all delicious individually but combined... not so much. I began by finely shredding my white fish - I'd a lovely piece of cod I had dreamt about pan-frying so it seemed a bit of a sacrilege to be pulling it apart like a wet toilet roll. Next I added breadcrumbs, parsley and salt and pepper before mixing and binding with an egg yolk. At this point a fairly pudding-shaped object was born, but like many of my previous Forgotten Recipes the cookbook likes to inexplicably throw a curveball, and I found myself instructed to coat my pudding in stiff egg white like some weirdo savoury meringue.

Moving beyond how stressful it is to take an egg white from liquid to stiff peak by hand (I'm a purist and like to torture myself by not using technological advances to speed the process up - hey, they wouldn't have had electric whisks in ye olde days), the pudding became damp and dubious looking. Into a greased pyrex bowl it went, and I stuck a tin foil hat on the top like the kids wear in the Mel Gibson alien movie Signs, with string tied round to avoid any splashes getting in thus ruining my greasy fishy treat. Which would have been a travesty, obviously.

After steaming away for almost an hour and only boiling dry to the chagrin of my 'captain sensible' partner once, the fish pudding was ready to be tipped out and surveyed. Adding a cook's best friend - dried parsley - to make it look a little more alive didn't stop it resembling a giant version of those fat balls you put out on a bird table to stop sparrows starving in winter. There's no danger of me becoming sparrow-like with my snack addiction, but the fish pudding won't be added to the repertoire any time soon. It tasted as oppressive and heavy as a North Korean military regime, only with added cod flavours.

Here's the recipe in full.

 

 

Steamed fish pudding

Servings: 3. Time: 1 hour.

Ingredients

12oz white fish

3 oz breadcrumbs

1 teaspoonful chopped parsley

Seasoning

Two eggs

Method

1 Remove skin and bone from fish, flake finely

2 Add breadcrumbs, parsley and seasoning

3 Bind with the egg yolks

4 Fold stiffly beaten whites into the mixture

5 Put into a greased bowl, steam.