No mystery about why I don’t cook from this book very often: my child doesn’t like soup. So I can go ahead and use the book as long as my kid is away at college. It has a lot of the classic soup recipes and a few good inspirations of its own—it’s a good reference work even if I have to admit not that much in the book grabs hold of me and makes me want to cook it the way she sets it out.
I’m going to make a fish soup because I have some ingredients that need using up. I used to be persnickety about frozen fish but if you’re getting them from a quality supplier, that’s pretty much exactly what you would be getting if you went to a fishmonger, for the most part. With a very narrow set of exceptions, fish at any retailer, no matter how good, has been flash-frozen at the time of catch.
I’m increasingly uneasy about eating fish, much as I love it. (Though that’s another thing that’s not loved by the rest of my household.) Mostly because I think nearly all fisheries are unsustainable in a way that’s unfixable compared to at least some livestock. Aquaculture maybe can work for a few species—catfish, tilapia—but not for others. (Salmon and trout are predators: you have to kill protein to yield protein and the way that’s done normally just doesn’t add up.) But for the moment, I’ll still eat it, and one of my favorite ways to eat a mix of seafood is in some kind of soup or stew.
I’m going to treat Kafka’s recipes as guidelines and basically mix up a fish chowder recipe in the book with a recipe for cioppino to yield something in between in terms of the components and flavors. I’m putting some squid, flounder, clams and lobster into the broth (after making a bit more lobster broth to round out what I’ve already got in the freezer) along with potatoes (that’s the chowder part) and then I’ll probably put a bit of saffron-smoked paprika mayo on top at service. Cooking soups strictly to recipe has never made any sense to me: soups are a sentence, there’s a grammar in how you assemble them, but you can speak them with different words each time and yet get close to the same meanings.
I love soup. Not fish soup. But if you’re ever wondering what to feed me, a meaty stew or a veggie soup will not go amiss. :)