Recipes, cut guides and step-by-step cooking for fish and meat — written for the cook standing at the counter at six o'clock.
What the recipes are drawn from: the fish slab on one side, the block on the other.
Whole, fillet, steak, shell. Choose what the counter actually has and the recipe adjusts its timings and its turning points to that shape of fish.
Where the cut sits on the animal, what it wants — fast heat or long and slow — and what to ask the butcher for when the label says something different.
Each step says the temperature, the minutes, and the thing you look for: skin that releases on its own, juices running clear, a fillet that flakes at the thickest part.
Drop recipes into days and the plan spreads the expensive cuts out, puts the fish early in the week and leaves the long braise for a day you are home.
The shopping list arrives in the order you walk the shop — fishmonger, butcher, greengrocer, dry goods — with quantities combined across every recipe in the plan.
How long the cut keeps, what freezes well and what does not, and what to do with the bones, the trim and the half fillet nobody ate.
Four parts of the same kitchen companion — ask us about any of them.
Recipes for the fish and shellfish a home cook can actually get hold of, from flat white fish to oily fillets and bivalves.
Illustrated maps of beef, pork, lamb and poultry, so you know what you are holding before you turn the hob on.
The whole method broken into hands-on steps you can follow with greasy fingers and a pan already hot.
Meal planning and a shopping list that talk to each other, so a week of cooking becomes one trip to the shops.
Content is added through the year as seasons and catches change.
Most home cooking goes wrong at the protein. The vegetables forgive you; a fillet does not. Two minutes too long and the fish is dry, two minutes too short and the pork is wrong — and neither mistake can be stirred back in.
So FISH & BUTCHER is built around that one part of the plate. Every recipe starts from what you bought rather than from a finished photograph: the thickness of the piece, whether the skin is on, whether it came out of the fridge ten minutes ago or an hour ago. The instructions then say what to look for, not just what to set the timer to.
The rest follows from there. Pick the week's cooking, and the plan puts the fish near the shopping day and the braise on a slow evening. The list comes out in the order of the shop. You arrive at the counter knowing the name of the cut you want and roughly what it should look like when it is handed over.
It is the kind of knowledge a good fishmonger or butcher gives you over the counter, written down and kept in your pocket for the nights nobody is there to ask.
I used to buy the same two fillets because I didn't know what to do with anything else. Now I ask for whatever looks good and read the guide on the walk home.
The cut guides are the part I keep going back to. I finally understand why one piece of shoulder wants four hours and another wants four minutes.
The shopping list grouped by counter sounds like a small thing. It has cut my Saturday shop roughly in half.
One step per screen, with a photo of what it should look like. I stopped burning the skin side about a week in.
No. Every doneness instruction is given twice — once as a probe temperature for anyone who owns one, and once as something you can see or feel: the give of the meat, the way a fillet flakes, juices from a joint.
Each fish recipe lists what else behaves the same way in the pan — similar thickness, similar fat, similar cooking time — so you can swap at the shop rather than abandon the plan.
That is normal; cut names change by country and sometimes by shop. The guides show where the cut sits on the animal and give the common alternative names, which is usually enough to point at the right thing.
No. A good share of it is written for the opposite case — the cook who buys fish once a fortnight, is nervous about it, and wants the method spelled out rather than assumed.
Yes. Send the enquiry form below and tell us what you were trying to cook; the people who write the guides read it.
A question about a cut, a request for a recipe, or an enquiry about working with us — this is the way in.
Thank you — someone from the kitchen team will get back to you shortly by email.