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Potage, St. Augustine
Place in a saucepan the head of any kind of a large, white, fresh fish, with a sliced each carrot, onion, branch celery, two sliced leeks, a sprig thyme, bay leaf and clove. Moisten with three quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper. Clip off both ends of twelve fresh okras and add trimming to the broth, then cut okras in half-inch pieces, keep on a plate, and boil broth rather slowly for an hour and fifteen minutes. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in another saucepan, add okras and cook for ten minutes. Strain the fish broth through cheesecloth into this pan, add two ounces raw rice, one peeled raw potato cut in small pieces, two peeled, seeded, fresh, finely chopped red tomatoes, and a half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, lightly mix, then let boil for forty-five minutes. Pour in two gills hot milk, boil for five minutes, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A fish-head broth turned into an okra and rice soup, closer to a Gulf Coast gumbo than to a French potage. The measurements are Edwardian but the method is sound; the only real pitfalls are the milk at the end and the length of the second boil.
- Two gills of milkA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup of hot milk. Add it off a hard boil and hold the soup just below a simmer; the tomatoes make the pot acidic enough to curdle milk that is boiled aggressively for five minutes.
- The fish headAny lean white fish will do: cod, snapper, grouper. Ask a fishmonger for one, gills removed and well rinsed, and avoid oily fish such as mackerel or salmon, which turn the broth strong and grey. One head from a large fish, roughly 1 to 2 lb, suits three quarts of water.
- Strain seriouslyCheesecloth is not decorative here. Fish heads shed fine pin bones and gill fragments, and a single layer of muslin over a fine sieve is the difference between a clean soup and a gritty one.
- Okra trimmingsThe tops and tails go into the broth and are strained out with the bones; only the half-inch rounds go into the finished soup. Cooking the cut okra in butter for ten minutes before the liquid goes in helps limit how slippery it becomes.
- Two ounces of riceAbout a third of a cup of long-grain white rice, by weight rather than volume. Forty-five minutes will take it well past done, which is the intention: it breaks down and thickens the soup. If you want distinct grains, add the rice for the last twenty minutes instead.
- SeasoningTwo teaspoons of salt into three quarts is light by modern palates, and the broth reduces considerably over the hour and a quarter. Taste and correct after the milk goes in, not before.
- YieldThe original is silent. Three quarts of water cooked down in two stages gives roughly two quarts of finished soup, enough for six as a first course.
Okra, rice and tomato in one pot places this squarely in the Gulf and Lowcountry tradition rather than the French one, whatever the word potage on the title suggests. St. Augustine, on the Atlantic coast of Florida, was a resort town of some fashion by the turn of the twentieth century, and hotel kitchens there presented their results in the classical French idiom their guests expected. Dishes in the grand-hotel cookbooks of the period are routinely named for a city or a patron with no further explanation, and the name here is best read as a nod to place rather than a documented origin. What is genuinely old is the technique: extracting a broth from the head and frame, which are a good source of gelatin, and thickening it with okra and broken-down rice instead of a flour roux.