HEN it comes to freshwater fish, nothing beats the wild brown trout. In the eating, I mean, not the fishing. If you’re after wisdom on the art of the perfect cast, you may need to look elsewhere. Anyway, it’s not as if there’s a huge amount of competition, save wild salmon (remember them?), admittedly splendid and glorious beasts. But the smaller fish have a sweetness and gentle elegance, their flavour an absolute distillation of the water from which they are plucked—pristine and pure, like gin-clear Southern streams. Or tinged
