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Fish Soup
When you buy fish and have it filleted, ask for the bones and trimmings to be sent also. Put a quart of milk to heat and add to it a bunch of mixed herbs, a few minced shallots, parsley, pepper and salt. Throw in your fish and cook for an hour. If you have any celery put in a piece, or two or three white artichokes. Strain the soup, taste it, and add more salt or more milk as you think necessary. Return to the pan. Take the yolk of an egg and just before taking the soup from the fire, stir it quickly in. This soup must never boil. It should be made out of the very white fish, excluding herring and mackerel.
A milk-based fish soup of the type Belgian households made from the frames and trimmings left after filleting. Two things in the original need adjusting: the cooking time and the way the egg yolk goes in.
- Never let it boilThis is the hinge, and the original says so plainly. Milk boiled with fish bones scorches on the pan bottom and turns grainy, and once the yolk is in, boiling curdles it outright. Hold the pan at a bare shiver, around 180F, with no bubbles breaking the surface.
- An hour is far too longFish bones give everything they have in 20 to 30 minutes; beyond that the stock turns bitter and takes on a glue-like heaviness, and any fish flesh clinging to the frames disintegrates. Simmer the bones and trimmings 25 minutes, then strain.
- White artichokesThis most likely means Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes) rather than globe artichokes or the tinned hearts, though the term is not certain. Peel and slice them; they will need the full simmering time to soften.
- The bunch of mixed herbsA bouquet garni: thyme, bay and parsley stalks tied with kitchen string so it lifts out cleanly. Tie it, since the soup is strained anyway and you do not want leaves in the sieve clogging it.
- Tempering the yolkDo not stir a raw yolk into a hot pan. Beat it in a bowl, ladle in a little of the hot soup while whisking, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat. The soup thickens slightly and gains gloss; a second yolk makes it noticeably richer.
- Which fishThe exclusion of herring and mackerel is about oil, not snobbery — oily fish makes milk taste rank. Cod, haddock, hake, whiting, sole, turbot and monkfish all work. Sole and turbot frames give the best body because of their gelatine.
- Adding the filletsThe recipe means the trimmings when it says "throw in your fish." If you want fish in the finished soup, poach diced fillet in the strained, seasoned milk for three or four minutes at the end, after which the yolk goes in.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the vegetables gives four modest bowls as a first course. It does not reheat well once the yolk is in — the soup will separate — so finish only what you plan to serve.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and it was sold to raise money for their relief. That origin shows plainly here: the recipe begins by telling you to ask the fishmonger for the bones and trimmings, and it builds a whole course out of them. Milk-based fish soups are a north-sea coast habit shared across Flanders, the Netherlands and Denmark, and the finish with an egg yolk stirred in off the boil is the same thickening that underlies Belgian waterzooi, the country's best-known chicken or fish stew. The instruction to exclude herring and mackerel is worth noting, though what lies behind it is a matter for speculation: those were the cheap, abundant, heavily salted and smoked fish of the period.