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Oukha of Pickerel
Split in two through the back a two-and-a-half-pound pickerel, bone it and mince it fine, place in a mortar with tablespoon oil and pound to a fine pulp. Add bread panade and two egg yolks. Season with teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and teaspoon freshly grated horseradish, then pound again until well amalgamated. Remove, place on a dish, then make into little balls the size of cranberries and keep on a plate. Place the bones and head of the fish in a saucepan with two sliced onions, three bay leaves, one heaping teaspoon salt, two and a half quarts water and set to boil forty-five minutes. Strain the broth through a cheesecloth into another saucepan, add the fishballs, twelve stoned, sliced olives, and let it simmer five minutes. Pour the soup into a soup tureen, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A Russian fish soup built in two stages: a stock from the frame and head, and tiny forcemeat dumplings poached in it at the last minute. Nothing here is difficult, but the quenelle mixture is where the dish is won or lost.
- The hinge: bind the forcemeat properlyThe pulp must be pounded until it is genuinely smooth and tacky before the panade and yolks go in, and pounded again after. An under-worked mixture disintegrates in the broth. Poach one test ball first; if it falls apart, work in a little more panade and chill the mixture for 20 minutes before rolling the rest.
- Bread panadeUnspecified because it was assumed knowledge: crustless white bread soaked in milk or a little of the fish stock, then squeezed nearly dry. Reckon on about a cup of soft crumb for this quantity of fish, added gradually — enough to bind, not enough to taste of bread.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon, which is assertive in a mixture of this size; start with half that if your cayenne is fresh.
- PickerelIn American usage of the period this generally means one of the smaller members of the pike family, though the name has also been applied regionally to walleye. Any firm, lean freshwater fish works — pike, walleye, perch. Avoid oily fish, which muddies the broth. A 2½-pound whole fish yields roughly 1 to 1¼ pounds of flesh.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does the pounding in under a minute. Keep the fish cold and pulse rather than run it continuously, or the flesh warms and the emulsion breaks.
- The stockRemove the gills from the head before it goes in the pot — they carry bitterness and grit. Forty-five minutes at a bare simmer is right; a hard boil clouds a fish broth and no amount of straining will clear it. Skim as it comes up to heat.
- Five minutes means five minutesCranberry-sized dumplings are cooked through almost as soon as they float. Held longer they tighten and go bouncy. Drop them into broth that is trembling, not rolling.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of water reduces to roughly two quarts of finished soup — six to eight servings as a first course.
Oukha is a transliteration of the Russian ukha, the clear fish soup; the word is older than the borrowed sup, and it once covered broths of meat and poultry as well, narrowing to fish only gradually. Its defining quality is clarity — a proper ukha is a limpid broth, not a chowder. The version here, with its pounded quenelles, olives and horseradish, reads as a restaurant treatment rather than a village one: forcemeat balls and stoned olives belong to the international hotel kitchen of the period, which absorbed regional dishes and rendered them in the grammar of French service. Collections of this kind gathered foreign dishes for American households curious about other tables, and the results often tell you as much about the professional kitchens that mediated them as about the countries they came from.