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Valank Tsorbassi, Odessa
Place in a saucepan two pounds fresh whitefish, bones or heads of same, with a sliced each carrot and onion, two sliced branches celery, two branches parsley, a branch chervil, sprig thyme, bay leaf, clove and bean crushed garlic. Moisten with three quarts water and half gill white wine. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, let boil for fifty minutes, strain the broth through a cheesecloth into another saucepan, add three ounces raw rice and let boil for thirty-five minutes. Shell a half pint cooked shrimps, cut them into three pieces each, add to the soup, boil for five minutes, pour into a tureen and serve.
A clear fish broth thickened only by rice, in the manner of a Black Sea port kitchen. The whole dish hangs on straining the stock properly; anything that gets through will cloud it.
- Half a gill of wineA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons. It is a small amount by design — enough acidity to lift the broth, not enough to make it taste of wine.
- Whitefish and its bones'Whitefish' here may mean Great Lakes whitefish, then common on American menus, but the word was also used loosely for any lean white-fleshed fish. Any lean white fish works: cod, haddock, hake, pollock. Use the frames and heads with gills removed, and skip the guts entirely, or the broth turns bitter.
- Fifty minutes is too long for the fleshFish stock gives everything it has in 25 to 30 minutes and grows glue-like and bitter past that. If you want to eat the two pounds of fish rather than treat it purely as stock material, lift the fillets out after 8 to 10 minutes and return them, flaked, at the end.
- StrainingCheesecloth, not just a colander. Ladle rather than pour, leave the last cloudy inch in the pan, and do not press the solids — pressing is what makes a fish broth grey and muddy.
- Three ounces of riceAbout a scant half cup of long-grain white rice. Thirty-five minutes will cook it well past al dente into something soft that slightly thickens the soup, which is the intended texture here; 18 to 20 minutes gives separate grains if you prefer them.
- Half a pint of shrimpA volume measure, about 8 fluid ounces, and as written it is measured before shelling, so the shelled yield will be rather less. They are already cooked, so the five-minute boil is only to heat them; two minutes is plenty and keeps them from going rubbery.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. A little flat-leaf parsley with a few fennel fronds or a pinch of tarragon covers the anise-parsley note it contributes.
- A bean of garlicRead as a single clove-sized piece of garlic; here one crushed clove of garlic in addition to the clove of spice listed alongside it.
- YieldThree quarts of water will reduce over the long boil, and the rice absorbs some of what remains; expect roughly six to eight bowls as a first course.
The International Cook Book gathered dishes from ports and capitals under the names its author heard them by, and the transliterations often wandered. Tsorbassi is plainly the Turkish çorbası, "soup of" — the same word that gives Balkan čorba and Romanian ciorbă — and the dish is generally taken to be a Black Sea fish soup, the sort sold along the Odessa waterfront where Turkish, Greek, Jewish and Ukrainian cooking overlapped. The construction is nonetheless Franco-American: a bouquet of carrot, celery, thyme, bay and chervil, a splash of white wine, and shrimp added at the last moment are the habits of a professional hotel kitchen rather than a quayside one. What the recipe really records is how an early twentieth-century chef in New York rendered a foreign soup for his own brigade — the name kept, the method translated into the only grammar his cooks knew.