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WATER SOUCHET (another way)
Take a quart of water, a few perch or flounders, some parsley and parsley-roots. Stew these in a suitable pan, and when soft pulp them through a sieve. Into the liquor put some more fish with more parsley and parsley-roots and some salt. Boil till the fish is done enough, and then send it to table in the surrounding water, together with the roots. The trimmings of the fish stewed down strengthens the water in which the fish is afterwards served.
A plain fish-and-broth dish that depends entirely on two things the original assumes you have: parsley root, and fish fresh enough to be worth eating in clear liquid. Quantities are left to the cook throughout.
- The hinge: two batches of fishThe first lot of fish is sacrificial — it is cooked to pieces and pushed through a sieve to build the broth. Only the second lot is served, and it should be poached gently, not boiled hard, or the fillets break up in the bowl.
- Parsley-rootsThis means Hamburg parsley, a parsnip-like root grown for eating rather than for leaves. It appears at farmers' markets and in Eastern European groceries; parsnip is the nearest substitute, though sweeter, and celeriac or the white part of a leek will carry the broth if neither can be had.
- QuantitiesThe quart here is most likely the imperial one, about 40 fl oz or five cups (a US quart is four). For that much water, reckon on about a pound of trimmings and small fish for the first stewing and a pound of good fillets for the second, with two or three parsley roots split between them.
- Pulping through a sieveA food mill or a stiff wooden spoon against a conical strainer does this properly. A blender will break up the bones and muddy the liquor.
- Timing the second fishPerch and flounder fillets need five to eight minutes at a bare simmer; whole small fish, ten to twelve. "Boil till the fish is done enough" reflects an era of longer cooking and will give you shreds if taken literally.
- TrimmingsHeads, frames and skin from the filleting make the strongest broth. Avoid gills and any dark viscera, which turn the liquor bitter and muddy.
- SeasoningSalt is the only seasoning named, and the dish stands or falls on it. A squeeze of lemon and plenty of chopped parsley leaf at the table are traditional and do not violate the spirit of the thing.
- ServingA quart of broth serves two generously or four as a first course. It is eaten from a soup plate with the fish and roots in the liquid, and thin brown bread and butter was a common accompaniment.
Water souchet is generally taken to be an anglicisation of the Dutch waterzootje — roughly "water-boiled thing" — and by the nineteenth century it was firmly associated with the Thames-side taverns at Greenwich, where whitebait dinners and souchet of flounder or perch were served to parliamentary and City parties. Its logic is that of a fishing river rather than a market: it uses whatever small freshwater or estuarine fish came to hand, and extracts a second dinner's worth of flavour from the trimmings. The two-stage method — sacrifice one batch to make the liquor, poach the second in it — is a general technique dressed up as a single dish.