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Skate Soup
The bones of skate are so delicate and gristly that they can easily be converted to jelly; consequently, good nourishing soup may be made of this fish. Clean two pounds of skate, and hang it in the open air for a day; cut it into small neat fillets, and put the trimmings and the head into a saucepan with two quarts of fish stock or water. Let it simmer gently for an hour, and carefully remove the scum as it rises; then add an onion, a turnip, a bunch of parsley, and a few sticks of celery, and simmer all gently together till the liquor is reduced to one quart. When this point is reached, the soup may be finished in two ways: either thicken the broth with a little brown thickening, add the fillets, simmer them till done enough, and flavour the soup with a dessert-spoonful of ketchup, a glass of sherry, and pepper and salt if required; or drop two ounces of vermicelli into the soup, and when it is done enough, which it will be in a few minutes, mix with the soup a quarter of a pint of cream beaten up with the yolk of an egg, stir it over the fire for eight or ten minutes, but on no account allow it to boil, and serve very hot. When the soup is finished in the latter of these two ways, it is well to boil all the skate in the stock, and thus dispense with the fillets. Time, two hours and a half. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. per pint. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A thrifty Victorian fish soup that relies on the gelatine in skate cartilage for body. Two details need attention before anything else: the day's hanging, and the egg-and-cream liaison at the end.
- The hinge: never boil the liaisonOnce the cream and egg yolk go in, the soup must be held below a simmer. The original says eight to ten minutes over the fire; two or three minutes of gentle stirring is enough to thicken it, and much longer risks curdling even off the boil.
- Hanging the fishSkate was traditionally aged a day or two because the urea in its flesh breaks down to ammonia, which was thought to slacken the notoriously firm muscle. Do not leave fish at room temperature; buy skate wing already a day or two off the boat and keep it refrigerated. If it smells strongly of ammonia rather than faintly, it is past use.
- What to buyAsk for skate wing, which is mostly cartilage in fanned rays with flesh on either side. Two pounds of wing on the bone yields roughly a pound of fillet; the trimmings and any head your fishmonger will part with are the whole point of the stock.
- KetchupIn Cassell's, unqualified "ketchup" means mushroom ketchup, a thin dark salty condiment, not tomato sauce. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons. Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute, used more sparingly.
- Brown thickeningA brown roux, flour cooked in butter or dripping until nut-coloured, worked into the hot broth. About an ounce each of butter and flour will lightly bind a quart.
- MeasuresThese are imperial: a quart is 40 fl oz (about 1.14 litres), so two quarts reducing to one means a halving. A quarter-pint of cream is 5 fl oz, roughly 150 ml. A "glass" of sherry here means a wine glass, about 2 fl oz.
- Timing the filletsSkate fillet poaches in five to eight minutes depending on thickness, not the vague "till done enough". The flesh separates into strands and pulls cleanly from the cartilage when ready.
- YieldA quart of finished soup serving six to eight means small first-course portions of roughly 5 to 7 fl oz. Scale up if it is to be a main course.
Skate was among the cheaper fish on a Victorian British slab, sold in wings and often treated as food for those who could not afford turbot or sole, which is why the first sentence takes the trouble to argue its case. The argument is a sound one: skate has no true bones, only cartilage, and that cartilage gives up gelatine readily, so a skate stock sets more firmly than most fish stocks. Hanging the fish for a day before cooking was a common British practice, and skate is still aged elsewhere -- in Korea, fermented skate is eaten deliberately; the reason usually given is the ammonia that skate flesh produces as it ages, which cooks off but leaves the texture softened. The two finishes offered here, one a brown thickened broth with sherry and ketchup, the other a white soup bound with cream and egg yolk, reflect the familiar Victorian division between brown and white soups rather than any regional tradition.