Water Souchy
Perch, tench, soles, eels and flounders are considered the best fish for this dish. For the souchy, put some water into a stewpan with a bunch of chopped parsley, some roots, and sufficient salt to make it brackish. Let these simmer for 1 hour, and then stew the fish in this water. When they are done, take them out to drain, have ready some finelychopped parsley, and a few roots cut into slices of about 1 inch thick and 1 inch in length. Put the fish in a tureen or deep dish, strain the liquor over them, and add the minced parsley and roots. Serve with brown bread and butter.
A poached-fish dish that is really a soup, and the whole thing depends on the broth rather than on browning or seasoning added at the end. Two details in Beeton's text need translating before you start.
- "Roots" means root vegetablesIn Victorian usage this generally means a bundle of carrot, parsnip, celeriac, turnip or parsley root — the same aromatics sold as soup greens. Parsley root is a reasonable choice here, echoing the chopped parsley finish.
- The dice measurement is garbledSlices "about 1 inch thick and 1 inch in length" describe cubes rather than slices. Cut them small enough to cook through, and add them to the finished soup already tender.
- "Brackish" is a real instructionThe broth is the dish, so salt it deliberately — noticeably salty, well beyond plain seasoned water. Fish poached in under-salted water tastes washed out, and there is no sauce here to rescue it.
- An hour for the broth, minutes for the fishThe long simmer applies only to the parsley-and-root water. Fillets of sole or flounder need three to five minutes at a bare tremble; whole small perch or a cut eel, eight to twelve. Boiling breaks the flesh and clouds the liquor.
- Fish choice todayTench is effectively unobtainable outside angling circles, and perch is regional. Sole, flounder, plaice, or firm freshwater fish such as pike-perch all work. Eel should be bought already skinned and cut; ask the fishmonger.
- Strain properlyPass the cooking liquor through a fine sieve or muslin. Scales, bones and loose parsley stalks are the difference between a clear broth and a murky one, and clarity is the point of the dish.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, something like a pound and a half of fish with two pints of broth will serve four as a light main course. The brown bread and butter is not a garnish — thin slices of buttered wholemeal, served alongside, are the accompaniment the recipe names, and the only starch.
The name is generally traced to the Dutch waterzootje (said to derive from zooien, to boil), a fish stew long associated with the Low Countries and particularly with Ghent, where a version made with chicken is still a civic speciality. English cooks appear to have taken it up at some point, and it became strongly identified with the riverside taverns of Greenwich, where whitebait and water souchy were served to parliamentary dinner parties through the nineteenth century; Beeton, for her part, treats it as a familiar dish needing no introduction. The list of fish suggests it began as a freshwater preparation: perch, tench and eels are river and pond fish, the catch of an inland household or an angler, and the dish is essentially a way of eating them at their freshest with nothing between the fish and the broth it cooked in.