An Exaltation of Soups (57 page)
Read An Exaltation of Soups Online
Authors: Patricia Solley
R
IDDLE
M
E
T
HIS
Q
UESTION
: What am I? You throw away the outside and cook the inside. Then you eat the outside and throw away the inside.
HILE
CONGER EEL (OR FISH) CHOWDER
CALDILLO DE CONGRIO
(P
ESCADO
)
Serves 6 to 8
The cars ran fast. The trains, all crowded and with people standing over the platforms, looked like serpent’s light rings. From all of the City’s streets there came rivers of people. And because in Chile Christmas meets with the end of spring and the beginning of summer, there were streams of warm air under the exuberant green of the trees.
—L
UIS
O
RREGO
L
UCO
,
nineteenth-century Chilean novelist,
from C
ASA
G
RANDE
I
MMORTALIZED BY
P
ABLO
Neruda in his
Elementos Odas’
“Oda al Caldillo de Congrio”, this classic fish soup of the Chilean coast is simple, tasty, and filling. Inspired by Neruda’s poem, you will surely cook it up in a haze of pleasure and dine on it as if you were in heaven. If you want to add potatoes for heartiness, cook them, diced, in a little fish stock until tender and add with the fish.
4 tablespoons olive oil
8 garlic cloves, chopped
2 large onions, chopped
2 jalapeño peppers, seeded and finely chopped
8 ripe or canned tomatoes, peeled and chopped, juices reserved
2 pounds conger eel, skinned but still on the bone, or other saltwater fish fillets
1 pound raw large shrimp, peeled and deveined
4 cups Fish Stock
3 medium potatoes, diced and cooked until tender in a little fish stock (optional)
2 cups heavy cream
Salt and pepper to taste
Minced fresh parsley or green onions, for garnish
O
P
REPARE
Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list, to include cooking the potatoes if you plan to add them to the soup.
O
C
OOK
1. Heat the oil in a large soup pot over mediumhigh heat and stir in the garlic, onions, and jalapeño peppers. Sauté until soft.
2. Add the tomatoes and cook down over medium heat for about 8 minutes. Toss in the eel and shrimp, cover the pot, and steam the seafood for about 2 minutes. Remove the cover and let stew gently for 5 more minutes, until the eel is just done and a little shrunk.
3. Pour in the reserved tomato juices and the stock and bring to a boil. Stir in the potatoes, if using, and return to a simmer. Stir in the cream. Season with salt and pepper and allow the soup to return to a simmer.
O
S
ERVE
Fork the eel off the bone into the soup, discarding the bone. Ladle the soup into bowls and garnish with minced parsley or green onion.
C
HILEAN
C
UISINE
…
AND
C
HRISTMAS
Chile’s
cocina criolla chilena
combines food traditions of its native Mapuches, Pehuelches, and Tehuelches peoples with those especially of the Spanish who came to conquer and stay in the sixteenth century. Castilians, Andalusians, and Basque came to the New World bearing strange new gifts of food—rice, fruits, new meats, and dairy products—that transformed the food culture. With a coastline (2,650 miles long) ten times longer than its width, though, Chile has always been anchored in the bounty of the sea—abalone, eel, scallop, turbot, large barnacle, king crab, and salmon—and people love nothing better than to take these out of the sea and put them straight into their soup kettles for
caldillos.
At Christmas time—the middle of the summer season—Catholics observe the
novena
, nine days of prayer and fasting before December 25. Children keep a watch for
Viejo Pascuero
, or Old Man Christmas, who climbs through the windows of this nation of small chimneys. Christmas Eve dinner is usually eaten after Midnight Mass,
Misa del Gallo
—the fish soup followed by turkey and salads washed down with local Chilean wine.
| “ODE TO CONGER CHOWDER” | |
| In the storm-tossed Chilean Sea lives the rosy conger, giant eel of snowy flesh. And in Chilean stewpots, along the coast, was born the chowder, thick and succulent, a boon to man. You bring the Conger, skinned, to the kitchen (its mottled skin slips off like a glove, leaving the grape of the sea exposed to the world), naked, the tender eel glistens, prepared to serve our appetites. Now you take garlic, first, caress that precious ivory, smell its irate fragrance, then blend the minced garlic with onion and tomato until the onion is the color of gold. | Meanwhile Steam our regal ocean prawns, and when they are tender, when the savor is set in a sauce combining the liquors of the ocean and the clear water released from the light of the onion, then you add the eel that it may be immersed in glory, that it may steep in the oils of the pot, shrink and be saturated. Now all that remains is to drop a dollop of cream into the concoction, a heavy rose, then slowly deliver the treasure to the flame, until in the chowder are warmed the essences of Chile, and to the table come, newly wed the savors of land and sea, that in this dish you may know heaven. —PABLO NERUDA, 1990 |
ZECH
R
EPUBLIC
CHRISTMAS FISH SOUP
VÁNOCNÍ RYBÍ POLÉVKA
C
ZECH
C
ARP
Carp, the Christmas fish of choice, has been famous in Czech Bohemia since the sixteenth century. Now these sweet-faced fish are “grown” in special ponds and “harvested” right before Christmas. Their “farmers” catch them by draining the ponds and scooping them up to ship to Prague, live, in baskets. They’re not tiny: most weigh in at 4 pounds.
Serves 6 to 8
A
LTHOUGH TRADITIONALLY SERVED
in Czech homes at 6 o’clock in the evening on Christmas Eve, this heady soup is now just as traditionally doled out to the needy (and tourists!) by the mayor of Prague at Old Town Square on Christmas Eve afternoon. It’s a marvelous concoction: delicate chunks of sweet carp made sweeter by gently sweating root vegetables in butter, and very pretty with the buttery croutons and parsley on top. It’s the first course to a meal of fried carp and potato salad. And when did Christmas Eve carp become such an entrenched tradition? In the eighteenth century, when the poor couldn’t afford the venison or turkey that was served on the tables of the rich, but could reliably catch this freshwater fish to put on the family table.
F
OR THE BROTH
8 cups (2 quarts) Fish Stock, ideally made of the head and tail pieces of a hen carp
2 pounds freshwater fish fillets, preferably carp, but catfish is just fine
1 medium onion, sliced
F
OR THE SOUP
4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter
2 parsnips, peeled and diced
1 turnip, peeled and diced
2 carrots, peeled and diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 fish roe (if available)
2 tablespoons flour
Dash of grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste
Chopped fresh parsley and buttered croutons, for garnish
O
P
REPARE
1. If you make the fish stock from carp, place the fish head and tail pieces in 8 cups of salted water in a large soup pot. Add the fillets and onion and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to low, cover partially, and simmer until the onion is soft, about 20 minutes. If you are starting with basic fish stock, bring the stock to a boil over medium-high heat, reduce to low, and simmer the onion and fillets in the stock for 20 minutes. Strain, setting aside the fish fillets and discarding other solids.
2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list, including the parsley and croutons (cut cubes of bread, then toss them in a skillet with a tablespoon of butter until they are nicely toasted).
O
C
OOK
1. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large saucepan over medium-low heat, stir in the parsnips, turnip, carrots, onion, and fish roe (if using), and gently sweat, partially covered, until soft, about 10 minutes. Scrape the vegetables into the broth, washing out the pan with a cup of broth to get every scrap of flavor.
2. In that same saucepan, melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter, whisk in the flour, and stir until the roux has browned (for roux shortcuts). Pour a cup of the simmering stock into the roux and whisk to thicken, then stir the roux into the soup.
3. Bring the soup to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, partially covered, for 30 minutes.
4. Add the reserved fish, broken into bite-size pieces. Add the nutmeg and season with salt and pepper.
O
S
ERVE
Ladle the soup into bowls, top with the parsley and croutons, and carry it steaming to the table.
C
HRISTMAS
C
ZECH
: N
AUGHTY OR
N
ICE
?
Czech Christmas begins on December 5 with
Mikulas
, when a Saint Nicholas figure, dressed in a long robe and holding a staff, walks around town in the company of a Devil and an Angel. Saint Nicholas visits children and gives them gifts, but first asks them if they’ve been good or not—with the Devil and Angel paying close attention to the answers. By the next week, houses are being cleaned top to bottom and decorated. Special cakes and sweets are made from “risen” dough. And by December 20, tubs of carp appear for sale on the streets, in preparation for Christmas Eve dinner.
In the old days, of course, the celebration was more austere, as Christmas Eve was a Catholic fast, but people also were more superstitious. Dinner then was usually pea or lentil soup followed by barley and mushrooms, only an even number of people would be seated around the table, and fortunes were told when dessert apples were handed out and cut in half. If you saw a cross, you could be sure of sickness and even death; if you saw a star, good luck and riches.