Cod Soup
(Brittany.) To the flesh of three fine medium-sized cod, add 3 quarts veal stock, parsley, thyme, sweet marjoram, and a bayleaf, also an onion. Cook 2 hours, press through a sieve, add flour blended with butter, salt, pepper, 1 glass of white wine, and 1 dozen oysters. Simmer for 10 minutes and then serve.
A Breton fish soup written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities for the aromatics, no yield, and a cooking time that would reduce cod to threads. The structure is sound once you read it as stock-making rather than fish-cooking.
- The two-hour simmerCod flesh is finished in six to eight minutes and falls apart after twenty. The recipe as written puts flesh in the pot, but two hours only makes sense for a broth built on bone, head and trimmings. Build the broth long, then poach the flaked fillet in it briefly at the end.
- Three cod is a banquetThe flesh of three medium cod against only 3 quarts of stock is a quantity for a large table, not a household one. For six servings, scale to roughly 2 lb of cod plus a pound of bones and heads, and 1 quart of stock.
- Veal stockA light unsalted veal stock was the standard base of the period and is worth the trouble here; it gives body without tasting of meat. A mild chicken stock is the usual substitute. Avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- The oystersTen minutes of simmering turns oysters to erasers. Slip them in off the heat with their liquor and give them a minute or two, just until the edges ruffle.
- Flour blended with butterThis is beurre manié: equal weights soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the hot soup in small pieces. Roughly 1 oz of each per quart. Let it simmer a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- One glass of wineA wineglassful in cookery books of this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, rather less than a modern pour. Add the dry white with the beurre manié so the alcohol cooks off before the oysters go in.
- Pressing through a sieveThe instruction means the aromatics and cooked fish solids, not the bones. Push the flesh through a fine sieve or blend and strain; the result should be a smooth pale soup rather than a chunky chowder.
- The herbsThe recipe gives no quantities; a workable reading is a bouquet of parsley stems, a sprig each of thyme and marjoram, one bay leaf and a halved onion. Pull the bay out before sieving.
Brittany's claim on cod is not local water but distant water: from the sixteenth century onward, ships out of Saint-Malo, Binic and later Paimpol sailed for the Newfoundland banks and Iceland, and generations of Breton families lived on the proceeds and the leavings of that trade. Most of the catch was salted, so a soup built on fresh cod flesh with veal stock, white wine and oysters belongs to the coastal towns rather than the fishing crews — it is a bourgeois table dish, thickened with a butter-and-flour paste in the French manner and finished with the shellfish that Breton estuaries produced in quantity before the oyster blights of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The recipe's terseness is typical of its book, seemingly one of the turn-of-the-century collections that gathered dishes from European kitchens and printed them for American cooks with the apparent assumption that the reader already knew how a soup was put together.