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Soups from the Sea Selecting the Most Select
“This is some fine kettle of fish” is a phrase I hope you’ll use often when cooking the recipes in this chapter. This eighteenth-century expression originally meant a difficult or awkward situation, and that holds true for these soups and stews, too. While meats are added to the soup base at the onset of cooking, or soon thereafter, seafood is the last ingredient to be added to these recipes due to its short cooking time. Cubes of fish cook in three to five minutes, while it can take cubes of beef up to three hours to reach tenderness. In fact, overcooking is a common mistake cooks make when handling seafood. Another difference, when cooking fish and seafood, is that it does not freeze well—either before or after cooking. The reason is that when food is frozen, the liquid inside its cells expands to form ice. This expansion punctures the delicate cell walls, which makes the fish and seafood mushy once thawed. Though fish cooks quickly, it’s the base that takes the time. My suggestion is to double (or even triple) the recipe for the base, and freeze the extra portions. Thaw it, add the fresh fish, and within ten minutes you’ll be enjoying a delicious fish soup resulting from a longsimmered base enlivened by perfectly cooked fresh fish.
Most supermarkets still display fish on chipped ice in a case rather than pre-packaging it, and they should. Fish should be kept at a lower temperature than meats. When making your fish selection, keep a few simple guidelines in mind: Above all, do not buy any fish that actually smells fishy, indicating that it is no longer fresh or hasn’t been cut or stored properly. Fresh fish has the mild, clean scent of the sea—nothing more. Look for bright, shiny colors in the fish scales, because, as a fish sits, its skin becomes more pale and dull looking. Then peer into the eyes: They should be black and beady. If they’re milky or sunken, the fish has been dead too long. And if the fish isn’t behind glass, gently poke its flesh. If the indentation remains, the fish is old.
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