“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

– Virginia Woolf, author

Staying with the theme for another post in a rwo, we’ll take the level of difficulty for our pejerrey recipes up a notch. Just a notch, not too far. I ran across a book of local recipes called Creativa: El libro de la cocina y la repostería that was published as a group effort rather than with a single author. It purports to be pretty much a bible of local cooking, and indeed, most of the classic recipes one sees on menu after menu are presented in detail. And, there are a few that I’ve not seen, but presumably are more “home cooking” than restaurant fare. I’ve seen several versions of stuffed pejerrey, and I’ll be trying out at least a couple of them, but we’ll start with what I’ll call version A, for lack of a better term.

Filetes de Pejerrey Rellenos

Once again we’ll start with our mise en place, laid out and easy to reference – fillets of pejerrey, cleaned and trimmed, some lemon, salt and pepper, the insides of a bread roll and some milk to soak it in; chopped onion, butter, chopped cooked ham, an egg, minced garlic, grated parmesan, chopped parsley – pretty much the classic flavors and seasonings used in many a local dish.

Squeeze the lemon over the fish so that it’s well coated, then season generously with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, soak the bread innards in the milk for about 5 minutes to essentially turn to mush.

Put one layer of the fillets (half of them) in the bottom of a lightly buttered casserole or baking dish (ideally they would completely cover the base, as you’ll see in the final product, but I had what I had to work with in terms of fillet sizes and baking dishes.

Saute the onions in most of the butter until golden. You’ll have used a little of it for buttering the casserole dish, and save a small amount to put on top of the dish before baking.

Remove the pan from the heat and put in the remaining ingredients – you don’t need the excess milk from soaking the bread, just the soaked bread itself. Nor do you need the shell of the egg, I know I shouldn’t have to say that, but apparently, I do… that’s a story that I’ll simply leave you to imagine.

Mix thoroughly, still off the heat.

Layer this filling atop the layer of fillets and then top with the remaining fillets – again, if you can, completely cover the top with a layer of the fish. Put a couple of small knobs of butter on top of the fillets.

Bake in a medium hot oven for about 30 minutes until it’s puffed, browned and bubbly.

You could serve it in the casserole dishes if you made individual portion sizes, or, remove it and plate it. By itself, here, two small pejerrey was a perfect meal. If I’d have accompanied it with a side dish or had the fish been bigger I’d have probably split it down the middle and turned it into two portions.

More or less, it’s an oven-baked pejerrey frittata, and it’s absolutely a winner. This should be on menus!