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Fish Broth with Sago
Finely slice one medium peeled carrot, one onion, two leeks and two branches celery; place these in a large saucepan with three quarts water; add two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one sprig thyme, one sprig marjoram, one blade mace, one bay leaf and one clove; season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper. Boil forty minutes, then add two pounds clean whitefish bones and gently simmer forty-five minutes. Remove, strain broth through a double cheesecloth into another saucepan, reset on fire and as soon as it comes to a boil dredge in three ounces well-washed and completely drained sago; lightly mix with spoon while adding it, then slowly boil twenty minutes, mixing once in a while. Remove, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear fish broth thickened and given body by sago, in the style of the invalid and light-supper soups that filled the opening chapters of turn-of-the-century international cookbooks. Two things need adjusting: the length of the fish simmer and the handling of the sago.
- Cut the fish simmer shortForty-five minutes on fish bones is longer than modern practice generally recommends. Fish frames give up most of their gelatin and flavour in 20 to 30 minutes, and longer extraction is commonly said to bring out bitterness. Simmer the bones 25 minutes at most, then strain.
- What "whitefish bones" meansMost likely the frames of any lean white fish -- sole, flounder, cod, haddock, halibut, snapper -- rather than the Great Lakes whitefish specifically. Avoid salmon, mackerel and other oily fish, which make a broth that tastes strongly of the fish oil. Ask a fish counter for frames and heads with the gills removed, and rinse away any blood, which clouds and sours the stock.
- SagoPearl sago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold in small hard pearls. Pearl tapioca of the same size behaves nearly identically and is far easier to find. Three ounces is about half a cup of small pearls, which will thicken three quarts of broth to a light, slightly viscous soup rather than a porridge.
- Washing and dredging the sagoRinsing removes loose surface starch that would cloud the broth, and "completely drained" matters because wet pearls clump the moment they hit the liquid. Scatter them into boiling broth a little at a time while stirring, or they will sink and weld into a mass on the bottom.
- Twenty minutes is right for the sagoUnlike the fish timing, this one holds. The pearls need the full time to go from opaque white to translucent with only a faint white centre. Stir occasionally; sago sticks and scorches readily.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold in curled blades or ground. A blade is usually reckoned at somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace, added with the other aromatics; note that ground mace will not strain out as cleanly as a whole blade.
- ChervilOften unavailable fresh. A little flat-leaf parsley plus a few fronds of tarragon approximates its aniseed-parsley character; leaving it out entirely does no harm.
- Yield and finishingExpect somewhere under three quarts of finished soup after the long boil, enough for eight to ten as a first course. Season again after the sago goes in, since the starch mutes salt noticeably.
Sago reached European kitchens through the Dutch and British trade in the Malay Archipelago, where the pith of the sago palm has long been a staple starch, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into Western cookery almost entirely as a thickener for puddings and light soups. Its reputation was medicinal as much as culinary: sago and tapioca soups appear again and again in Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks under headings for invalids and convalescents, on the reasoning that a starch-thickened clear broth was nourishing without taxing the stomach. This recipe belongs to the classical French repertoire of *potages*, in which a carefully built infusion of root vegetables and herbs is strained to absolute clarity and then given texture by a single farinaceous addition — sago, tapioca, vermicelli, or rice. The instruction to strain through doubled cheesecloth serves that clarity, which was often said to be the mark of a competent kitchen.