Smoked Trout Pâté with Dill

The trout was in the fridge from Saturday's market. Two fillets, still in their paper, the skin golden and taut from the smokehouse. I'd bought them without a plan, which is often the best way to buy fish. The plan arrives later, usually around six o'clock, when someone is hungry and you need something good in a quarter of an hour.

This is barely a recipe. You break the fish apart with your fingers, fold it through crème fraîche with some horseradish and dill, squeeze lemon over it, and put it on the table with toast. The whole thing takes ten minutes if you stop to make tea halfway through. It's lighter than mackerel pâté, more delicate, with a sweetness to the smoke that the horseradish cuts through cleanly.

I keep coming back to it because it solves the particular problem of people arriving before you've had time to cook. A bowl of this, some good bread, a few cornichons if you have them, and nobody is going hungry while you work out what else to do. I wrote it down in the notebook once as "trout, cream, dill, Friday, enough." It was.

The dill matters. Not as decoration, but as a proper ingredient, grassy and sweet and slightly anise-scented, running through the whole thing. Use it generously. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, and this one is mostly about the fish and what you put next to it.