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Swedish Fish Soup
12 small panfish 2 qts. cold water 1/2 cup dry mushrooms 1/2 small cabbage 1 small onion 2 leeks, 1 cooked beet 4 sprigs parsley 1 tablespoon salt Skin and bone fish; cook heads and bones for thirty minutes in cold water with salt and mushrooms. Egg and crumbs the pieces of fish and fry in smoking hot fat, drain on brown paper. Cut cabbage fine and cook with chopped onion and leeks in 3 cups of boiling salted water for thirty minutes; the last five minutes add the chopped beet and parsley. Strain the fish broth upon them. Put the fried fish in the tureen and add the soup.
Small dumplings are often added and sometimes part of the fish is minced fine and mixed with them.
A two-part soup: a clear broth built from fish frames and vegetables, with separately fried fillets set in the tureen at the last moment. Most of the modernising is about not overcooking either half.
- The hinge: keep the fish out of the potThe fried fish goes into the tureen and the hot soup is poured over it, so the crust survives to the table. If you let the fillets sit in the broth on the stove they steam, the coating slides off, and the point of the dish is lost. Assemble at the last minute and serve immediately.
- PanfishPerch, crappie, bluegill or small sunfish — whatever a household angler brought home. Twelve small ones yields roughly a pound to a pound and a half of boneless flesh; two or three fillets of perch, tilapia or small trout with their frames will stand in. You need the heads and bones, so buy whole fish or ask for the frames.
- Don't overcook the framesThirty minutes is at the long end for fish bones; many cooks find stock simmered much beyond that loses its clean flavour. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at a bare simmer, skimming the grey foam, gives a cleaner broth. Don't let it boil hard.
- Dry mushroomsHalf a cup of dried mushrooms here would have been sliced field or cep-type mushrooms, home-dried or bought loose. Dried porcini are the closest match, and half a cup loose is roughly 15 g. Rinse off grit before adding them to the water.
- Cabbage timingThirty minutes of boiling reduces shredded cabbage to sulphurous mush. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough for finely cut cabbage with the onion and leek; add the beet and parsley in the last five as written, since the beet is already cooked and only needs heating.
- Leeks and beetSplit the leeks lengthwise and wash between the layers. The beet is specified as already cooked; a plain boiled or roasted beet, chopped, added late so it warms the soup without bleeding it entirely pink.
- Frying and draining"Smoking hot fat" is not a measured temperature; in practice fat starts to smoke somewhere around 350-375F, which is a workable frying range. Brown paper is the old draining surface; use a rack over a tray or paper towels, and keep the fried pieces warm in a low oven while you finish the soup.
- SaltA full tablespoon in two quarts is about right for a stock that will be strained onto lightly salted vegetable water, but taste the combined soup before serving — the fried, seasoned fish adds more salt than the recipe accounts for.
- Yield and the dumplingsServes about six as a first course, four as a meal. The optional dumplings are small flour-and-egg quenelles; mincing part of the fish into them, as suggested, turns the soup into a fuller supper dish.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, and its Scandinavian recipes reflect who was buying the flour: Minnesota and the upper Midwest absorbed enormous Swedish and Norwegian immigration through the late nineteenth century. The dish belongs to the broad family of Swedish fisksoppa, and its construction — a broth from the frames, root and cabbage vegetables cooked apart, the fish itself crumbed and fried — is thrifty in the way lake-country cooking had to be, using every part of a catch of small panfish that would otherwise be fiddly eating. The cooked beet reads as northern European rather than Anglo-American, as does the half-cup of dried mushrooms. Milling companies issued cookbooks like this one as advertising, which is why the collection ranges well beyond baking and why it accommodates the tastes of immigrant customers alongside standard American fare.