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Fish Soup
Melt in a stewpan on the fire two ounces of butter, put in a couple of sliced carrots and a sliced onion, and fry them brown, then add one quart of water, a sprig of thyme, two or three laurel leaves, three or four cloves, a dessertspoonful of sugar and half a pint of shrimps: boil until the carrots are quite soft, then add any cold fish, with the bones, and boil for twenty minutes. Toast some small pieces of bread and put them in the tureen; add half a glass of white wine to the soup, strain it over them and serve.
A frugal strained fish broth built on leftovers rather than a fresh fumet. Everything goes through the strainer at the end, so the vegetables and fish frames are flavouring, not garnish.
- Laurel leavesThese are bay leaves. Two or three dried leaves is plenty for a quart.
- Half a pint of shrimpsA volume measure; shrimp were commonly sold by the pint. Reckon on roughly 4 to 6 ounces of small shell-on shrimp, heads and all — much of the flavour is in the shells, and it all gets strained out.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons. It is there to round out the carrot and the shrimp shells, not to sweeten the soup.
- Any cold fish, with the bonesLeftover cooked fish and its frame. Use white fish — cod, halibut, flounder, snapper. Oily fish (mackerel, salmon, bluefish) turns the broth rank when simmered this long.
- The twenty-minute boilUnusually long by modern standards, but permissible here because the fish is strained out and discarded. Do not follow this timing for a soup in which the fish is eaten; keep the pot at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil or the broth goes cloudy and bitter from the bones.
- StewpanAny wide 3-quart saucepan. The carrots and onion want room to brown properly.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified. Season after straining, once the wine has gone in.
- The toastPut it in warmed bowls, not a cold tureen, and pour immediately — it is meant to soften in the broth, not dissolve into it.
- YieldA quart of water, less what boils away, makes a modest quantity — enough for about four as a first course.
This is a working kitchen's soup rather than a showpiece: cold fish and its bones, salvaged from a previous service, turned into broth with browned root vegetables and shrimp shells. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and his 1896 Cook Book mixes hotel-scale grandeur with exactly this sort of economy. "Laurel leaves" for bay follows the French feuilles de laurier, though the word was also ordinary usage in English cookery of the period. The bread in the tureen is older still: pouring broth over toasted bread is the original sense of a "sop," a habit that survived in nineteenth-century soup service long after trenchers themselves had gone.