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Water Souchet
Take some very small flounders or dabs; clean them thoroughly, and boil them in water with a little salt till tender. Take them up carefully with a slicer, one by one, keeping the white side uppermost. Put them into a vegetable-dish nearly full of boiling water, and throw into this two or three springs of clean double parsley. Serve very quickly. Hand round with the fish thin slices of brown bread and butter. Water souchet is made also of eels, soles, and plaice. The fish ought to be very small; but if these cannot be procured, and larger ones have to be used, they should be cut into moderate-sized pieces, the heads and tails being rejected. Time, a few minutes to boil the fish. Probable cost, 6d. for a moderate-sized dish. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A very plain dish that lives or dies on the freshness of the fish and the speed with which it reaches the table. Almost everything a modern cook needs to change is a matter of vocabulary rather than method.
- The hinge: cook it barelySmall flatfish need only two to four minutes in simmering water — the flesh should just part from the bone. The recipe itself allows only "a few minutes"; anything approaching a rolling boil for ten minutes will shred a dab into cotton wool.
- "Double parsley"The curly-leaved kind, as opposed to the flat-leaf or "single" parsley. Either works; curly holds its shape better sitting in hot liquid, which is the point here.
- A slicerA fish slice — a wide, thin, slotted turner. Lift each fish separately and keep the pale side up, as instructed; the skin tears if you crowd them.
- The cooking water is the soupThe recipe has you serve the fish in fresh boiling water, which gives a very thin result by modern taste. One option is to strain and reuse the cooking liquor, or to simmer the trimmings first for a light fish broth, and season it properly with salt.
- Fish substitutionsDabs are scarce at most counters. Small plaice, lemon sole, whole flounder or thick fillets of any firm white flatfish stand in. Whole small fish give more flavour to the liquid than fillets do; if using large fish, follow the instruction to cut them into pieces and discard head and tail.
- EelsNamed as an option, and a familiar version in the Thames-side taverns, but fresh eel is now expensive, tightly regulated, and in the case of European eel a species of conservation concern. Choose one of the flatfish instead.
- Cost and yield"6d." is sixpence, half a shilling — a token sum even then, which tells you this was cheap inshore fish. The stated three or four servings holds if you keep to the bread and butter alongside.
- ServingWide shallow bowls, spoons as well as forks, and thin brown bread and butter cut in advance. The dish cools fast, so warm the bowls.
The name is an anglicisation of the Dutch waterzootje — a dish of freshwater or inshore fish served in its own cooking liquor, generally traced to Dutch and Flemish cooking and attested in English from the eighteenth century. In London it became firmly attached to the Thames-side taverns of Greenwich and Blackwall, where water souchy of small flatfish or eels was a summer speciality eaten by the riverside, often with whitebait. Its appearance in a late-Victorian encyclopaedia of cookery shows what the dish was valued for: no sauce, no thickening, no disguise, just very fresh small fish and a few minutes of water. That kind of cooking only works where the catch is landed nearby, which is why the dish faded as the London fish trade moved inland and the Thames fisheries declined.