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Fish Chowder, Tokio
Lift up four filets from a small, well-cleaned, fresh flounder. Skin the filets, cut the meat into pieces one-half-inch square and keep on a plate. Place all the bones and skin in a saucepan with five pints water and boil for twenty minutes; strain the broth into a basin, wipe the pan and place it on the fire with one tablespoon butter. Cut in half and finely slice one carrot, one turnip, one onion and two leeks, add to the pan, then gently brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Mix in two tablespoons flour, add the rind of half a lemon chopped very fine, then pour in the fish broth. Season with a tablespoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and one heavy teaspoon curry powder; mix well and boil for thirty minutes. Add one good-sized, peeled, raw potato cut into small dice pieces, two tablespoons raw rice and one dry chili pepper cut in small pieces; then boil for twenty minutes more. Add the cut fish and two teaspoonfuls of finely shredded, dried, salt codfish, lightly mix, then let boil for twenty minutes more. Pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A Meiji-era curry soup filed under "chowder" for American readers. The recipe is sound, but the fish timing and the salt both need attention.
- Do not boil the fish for twenty minutesHalf-inch dice of flounder are cooked through in two to three minutes in simmering broth. Add them at the very end, off a hard boil, and let them stand in the hot soup rather than boiling them into cotton wool.
- SaltA full tablespoon of salt for five pints, plus dried salt cod, will taste harsh to most palates now. Start with a teaspoon, and salt again after the rice and potato have gone in and the liquid has reduced.
- Buying the fishOne small flounder yields perhaps 8 oz of usable meat. Ask for a whole flounder of about 1.5 lb filleted, with the frame and skin kept for the stock, or buy 12 oz of fillets and a separate pound of white fish bones.
- Five pints of stockThat is 10 cups, and it reduces steadily across the three boiling stages. Expect roughly 6 to 7 cups of finished soup, serving six.
- Dried salt codfishTwo teaspoons of shredded salt cod is used here as seasoning, not as fish. Salt cod (bacalao) is still sold in Latin, Italian and Portuguese groceries; shave it fine while dry. Its role is savory depth, and a tablespoon of bonito flakes gives a closer echo of what a Tokyo kitchen would have used.
- Lemon rindZest only, taken off with a peeler or microplane. The white pith under it turns bitter over the seventy minutes of boiling that follow.
- The chiliOne small dried chili, split and seeded, will be mild to moderate depending on the variety. The recipe has it cut into small pieces; leave it whole or in large pieces instead if you would rather remove it before serving.
- Rice and potatoTwo tablespoons of raw rice is deliberate restraint: it thickens the broth slightly along with the flour roux. If you hold the soup and reheat it, the rice will keep swelling and you may need more liquid.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's, arranged much of The International Cook Book as a tour of national kitchens, and the entries named for cities are his shorthand for a style rather than transcriptions of local practice. Curry reached Japan not from India but through the British: kare appears in Japanese cookery writing from the 1870s, spread partly through the navy and the new Western-style restaurants of Tokyo, though in the 1900s it was still largely a Western-style restaurant and military dish; the curry powder thickened with a browned flour roux, exactly as here, became genuinely familiar in Japanese homes only from the Taisho era and after, as domestic curry powder and packaged products arrived. Calling the result a "chowder" is Filippini's concession to his American readers, for whom any substantial fish soup with potato in it was a chowder; the dish has nothing to do with the salt-pork-and-milk chowders of New England, and one might guess that the dried salt cod stands in for the dried fish that would have given a Tokyo kitchen its savor.