Rick says: "When visiting Copenhagen, should you suffer from a surfeit of new Nordic cuisine, may I recommend Claus Christensen’s restaurant Gammell Mont or Bo Jacobsen’s restaurant opposite, Restaurantionen. Both will give you what is essentially French cooking with a definite nod in the direction of Denmark. Claus’s recipe was for a whole turbot cooked in a fabulously expensive turbot kettle. I hope he doesn’t mind but I have taken the idea and used a lemon sole instead. I have written this as a sort of fish course somewhere between the starter and the main."
1 hispi (pointed cabbage)
150g unsalted butter, cubed
3 tsp salt
½ tsp sugar
1 lemon
5 rasps grated nutmeg
2 lemon sole, weighing about 300g, filleted and skinned (ask the fishmonger)
150 ml milk
10 turns black peppermill
Small handful parsley, 4 sprigs set aside, the rest roughly chopped
Remove the outer leaves of the cabbage. Cut it in half, remove the solid stalk and thinly slice the cabbage. Melt 50g of the butter in a saucepan over medium heat, add 2 teaspoons of the salt, the sugar, the juice of half the lemon, the nutmeg and the sliced cabbage. Put a lid on the pan and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring frequently at the beginning to ensure the cabbage doesn’t catch.
Put the fillets side by side in a frying pan and add the milk, the paper and 1 teaspoon of salt. Bring to the boil, turn the heat down lot and cover. Poach for about 3 minutes. Remove the fillets from the pan and keep warm.
Pass the poaching liquor in the frying pan through a fine sieve and return to the pan. Bring to the boil and reduce the volume by half. Add the remaining cubes of butter (100g) and the juice of a quarter of the lemon and whisk until the butter has melted and the sauce has reduced down so that it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Stir in the chopped parsley.
Put the cabbage on 4 warmed plates, place the fillets on top and pour the sauce over. Serve each plate with a sprig of parsley.
