Celery, prawn and bottarga salad — a Rowley Leigh recipe

“We stayed talking and singing and drinking great draughts of claret, and eating botargo and bread and butter till 12 at night.” Samuel Pepys had simple but not unsophisticated tastes. (On realising the Great Fire of London was nearing his house, he dug a hole in his garden and buried his wine and parmesan.) Bottarga — salted, dried fish roe — was better known here in the 17th century, cropping frequently up in cookery books. But it then disappeared and if an Englishman was looking for the salty, fishy, umami side of things, he usually turned to anchovies.

Nowadays, bottarga has become exotic. A few Italian restaurants in London have it, but you’re more likely to sample it in Sardinia or Sicily, or in expensive restaurants from Amalfi to Venice. The two islands are where Italian bottarga is made, although other countries, notably Greece and Japan, produce something similar. Sardinia specialises in roe from grey mullet, Sicily in that from tuna (usually bluefin, unfortunately). Both are excellent. The Sicilian version is stronger and saltier, better for elaborate cooking; the Sardinian is perhaps more nuanced and delicate.

It is expensive: a 90g slab costs £20. I used half that in this salad for six, but for the classic spaghetti recipe — either plain spaghetti dressed in olive oil with grated bottarga or with chilli and garlic too — it costs relatively little. It is very good on scrambled eggs or a risotto and is beautiful grated over thinly sliced raw fish with a little lemon juice and olive oil.

Chef Giorgio Locatelli is of the same persuasion as Pepys. “When the new batches of spring bottarga come into the kitchen, I have to stop myself just sitting there, slicing it and eating it then and there,” he has written. “It is beautiful on toasted bread with some quite strong olive oil.”

Celery, prawn and bottarga salad

serves six

Choose celery as white as possible. It can be lightly blanched to remove the crunch, but I prefer it. Ogden Nash is ambivalent: “Celery, raw / Develops the jaw, / But celery, stewed, / Is more quietly chewed.”

1. Cook the prawns very briefly in boiling, very well-salted water. Drain and chill before peeling and cleaning out the digestive tract.

2. Separate the celery stalks and run a peeler down the outside of the largest, outer stalks to remove the strings. Cut the stalks on the diagonal into lengths of 3cm.

3. Cut the Little Gems crosswise into 1cm ribbons and separate them, mixing them with the celery.

4. Make a dressing with a teaspoon of sea salt, ground black pepper, the juice of the two lemons and four or five tablespoons of olive oil.

5. Toss the celery and lettuce in this mixture and arrange the prawns in the salad.

6. With a peeler, shave the bottarga into thin strips and arrange over the top. Serve with bread, ideally the Sardinian carta di musica.

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