beetroot and fish:
With Fish
Beetroot has enjoyed a long association with fish. Scandinavian beetroot salads often include fish. These are among the earliest beetroot recipes. Herring is the most common fish used in salads with beetroot in Norway and around the Baltic Sea. The herring can be sweet and smoked, unsmoked, or salted (matjes herring). Herring, sliced hard-boiled eggs, onion, parsley and vinaigrette are typically used as a garnish with cooked beetroot. Cooked potatoes, apple, and a cream dressing can also be used.
Anchovy fillets and radish, in addition to beetroot and potatoes, are ingredients in a typical Flemish winter salad. Beetroot with an anchovy dressing (Betteraves à la Provencale) is a related French dish. Cappon magro, from Liguria in Italy, is a type of Russian salad with beetroot and other vegetables layered up with fish and covered in a green sauce. Baked beetroot is one of the vegetables dipped into the traditional Piedmont garlic and anchovy sauce Bagna cauda, which is traditionally served in a huge copper pot that is dipped into communally at harvest festivals.
The Jewish community in Poland developed a version of the classic dish Gefilte fish with chrain using beetroot. Gefilte fish is poached fish balls; chrain is a sauce made with horseradish and, in this case, beetroot. Both fish and sauce are served cold. Claudia Rosen, in The Book of Jewish Food, describes the preparation of this appetizer, in which a slice of carrot is traditionally placed on top of each fish ball. Not all chrain recipes include beetroot, although grated horseradish is essential. The version developed in Poland has a sauce made using either beetroot juice or grated cooked beetroot, which is sweeter than most recipes for chrain. The beetroot softens the piquant flavour of the sauce and gives it a bright-red colour. The amount of beetroot added to chrain can vary from very little to around three times the amount of horseradish. Salt, sour cream, lemon juice, sugar and vinegar are other typical ingredients.
In Adam?s Luxury and Eve?s Cookery, an English cookbook of 1744, beetroots are fried as a garnish for carp and other fish. More recently, Jane Grigson offers a recipe for Sole with a beetroot gratin (Sole au betterave), which ?rings with brave affrontery?. She also suggests trying the recipe with brill, cod, haddock or whiting. The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book has a post-WWII British recipe for Sardine and beetroot salad, using cans of sardines (mashed), grated apple and diced pickled beetroot, served with salad cream and lemon juice on a bed of lettuce leaves. Gary Rhodes gives beetroot an updated East London feel in a recipe for Fillets of smoked eel on a warm potato, onion and beetroot salad. Modern British restaurants serve beetroot with a wide range of fish, in dishes such as Beetroot mould with turbot tartare and Loin of tuna with beetroot and red onion comfit. Nina Planck provides a recipe for Wild salmon, couscous and marinated beetroots with greens, in which sliced beetroot is boiled, making a pink stock that is absorbed by the couscous, and served with briefly-boiled beetroot leaves alongside seared salmon fillets.