Fish Bones, Thwarted Romance, Tea
A Collection of Ways to Make Fish Broth
At any food market, it’s the wet fish stalls that my capture my attention and senses the most: the horror and splendour of it all. Beady, blank-eyed stares in a haphazard flow and rows; frozen expressions looking right through you; glistening, wet floors and buckets of heads and bones piling up as the fishmonger glides their knives coolly through body after body… it would almost be gruesome if it weren’t so skilled, so obliging, so very real.
I slip behind the counter to eye the gory buckets more closely and ask “for the kitchen, or going spare?” and, if my luck is in, they’re mine. I wish I remembered to do this more often. I’ll make 2024 my year to procure more bones (lol) and make more fish soup because, as you will discover below, you can get pretty inventive. Less waste of those lovely fish, lots of goodness, and lashings of intrigue. On occasion though, I will buy fish soup straight up and have found that it makes an excellent little lunch with a dollop of creme fraiche, fresh dill, and a twirl of kimchi - as below.
On to actually making your own fish broth, a word to the wise, don’t leave it brewing in your slow cooker on a Friday night if there’s any chance of after-dark visitors. Nothing is more of a romance killer than the lingering scent of over-simmered fish bones. Also, fish bones really don’t need simmering as long as chicken broth. For the latter, anywhere between 12 and 24 hours is good, for the former it’s 30 minutes to an hour at most (recipes with chicken broth explored in detail here). I had to learn the hard way, but you don’t have to.
The first fish broth that I documented (and didn't fuck up) was this cod’s head number. Shane the fishmonger had kindly called across the market “Go on, Sal, I’ve got a couple of cod’s heads here you can do something with”. I bought a small cod while I was at it and mused all the way home over how I would prepare it. “I’ll roast it all with bay, celery, garlic, onions, thyme.”
“Then I’ll splosh it into a stock pot with a couple of cloves, peppercorns, wild fennel salt… later, I’ll sauté leeks and potatoes using a splash of dry Bretagne cider to deglaze the pan, and top this up with ladles of stock (plus a couple of onion petals from the pot), simmering thin ribbons of savoy cabbage until cooked, and then I’ll finish it all with dill, lemon, shredded roast cod and Kalamata olives, serving that same said cider on the side.”
I appreciate that’s quite a rambling recipe, so here’s something a bit more concrete if you want to get started with your first homemade fish broth:
+ Fill a roasting tray with sticks of celery, onions cut into quarters, garlic cloves, a carrot or two if you have some, fresh herbs like thyme or rosemary, and a couple of white fish heads and bones
+ Drizzle oil over the top and season with sea salt
+ Roast in the oven at 180 degrees for 30 minutes
+ Add to heavy based saucepan and barely cover with fresh, cold water
+ Add bay leaves, a handful of black peppercorns, more herbs
+ Bring to a simmer and allow to bubble gently for 30 minutes
+ Strain using a fine mesh sieve
Alternatively, you could melt butter in a saucepan, sauté roughly chopped celery, onion, garlic and carrot for a few minutes before adding fish head and bones and cooking for a couple of minutes more. You might then like to deglaze with some white wine or Pernod , adding a good glug more and topping up with water, allowing it to simmer for 30 minutes before straining.
I’ve used hake heads for the last couple of escapades. Such as spring 2023 when the dog rose was rambling up the sides of this old 1600s house, past Alun’s window and nearly reaching into mine. On warm days, you can sit under the window and be soothed by waves of sweet rose washing over you. So good you could almost taste it, want to taste it, why not taste it?
I decided to add some to my broth along with smoked sea salt to create that feeling of gentle sun, and also a handful of some aged green tea from Shimen Mountain in China to get juicy-sweetness almost like fresh peas. I seared some seriously hunky monkish pieces in butter until browned and added these too. I think it may be one of the very best things I have ever made. It’s awkward to admit that that I was kind of sad it didn’t draw more comment on instagram. It’s a funny yet common place to seek validation and on this occasion I just really wanted a ‘fuck me sideways’ kind of pat on the back to alleviate the small sense of sorrow that comes from a really good dish unshared as neither Alun nor Jennifer were about. Nevermind. I polished off the whole lot.
More on ways with wild garlic here >
One of the most recent additions to this series came about when Shane caught onto the fact that I was building this piece. “Sal, you’ll be the talk of the town if you used a skate spine. I bet no one else has written about it and, honestly, it’s so good. Loads of flavour, lots of meat, tons of collagen… go on… I’ll put them in the freezer and you can just take them when you’re ready.” His reasons were sound so I accepted the challenge. This one featured onion, bay, carrot and celeriac on the roasting tray and then a slow simmer with a dash of white wine vinegar, whole peppercorns, celery seeds, a good glue of Braeburn apple juice, and two teabags of Organic Spring Mao Feng green tea, plus my usual favourite wild fennel salt. To serve, there were pieces of skate pulled from the bones within the broth, as well as potatoes boiled whole very slowly then cut in half, and leeks grilled until black. I added a few curls of wild garlic, some chopped coriander stalks and a good blob of properly thick, sour creme fraiche.
With the very little amount I had left over (it went so wibbly wobbly in the fridge overnight - a sure sign of plenty of goodness) I made the most amazing béchamel sauce with dijon mustard, fuck tons of chives, and aged goat’s cheese, pouring it over some pasta with smoked salmon and capers.
Finally, in this short overview of broths and soups made with fish, I have a prawn head bisque with dragon well green tea and wild garlic to show you. I had made a kind of bisque once before as a base for a bouillabaisse for a potential new love interest I wanted to get to know better. He came for lunch, lay himself down on my living room floor and promptly poured his deepest soul out to me while the sky turned pink outside the window and the clouds rolled by to the flutter of Chopin’s nocturnes over his head. I listened calmly, didn’t get a word in edgeways, and he went back for seconds and thirds decimating my leftovers while he talked on and on into the darkness of evening. He did the washing up and took the bins out (his only redeeming contribution to the evening) and called me a short while later to tell me he didn’t want to be friends; I was too intense for him. I’ve wanted to make a bisque just for my big old intense self ever since (you can read more dating stories in my series Millennial Menoirs if you like) and I finally got around to it as part of a new series I hope to start in the coming weeks called Supper with Celia.
To make the bisque, I cooked around 12 prawn heads in butter until they were pink before adding quartered onions, garlic, and some bay leaves. A couple of minutes more and I deglazed the pan with some homemade lemon vodka, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and I scarcely covered it all with water before adding a generous sprinkle of that wild fennel salt. After letting it bubble gently for nearly an hour, I chucked in a handful of Chinese Dragon Well green tea (it has a lovely chestnut flavour) and I blended it all up, shells and all. It was then passed through a fine sieve, before I added it back to a clean pan with a tablespoon of tomato puree, a teaspoon of smoked paprika, and two serious blobs of creme fraiche. I popped some torn wild garlic leaves in to let them wilt in the heat and will serve this all up to myself for Sunday lunch once the bisque has had a little sleep in the fridge overnight. Chopin can pop his head in if he likes, so long as he doesn’t regale me with the very depths his life story and is happy to do the washing up.
My fish broth repertoire is not as extensive as this Chicken Broth Party piece which spans years of cooking but I am hoping it will get there. I’d love to hear your suggestions and I’d also love it if you’d be so kind as to share this post so it gets a wider readership. It’s your encouragement that keeps me documenting all the things that happen in my kitchen and I hope it’s of interest or use to you, too.
Another lovely piece of writing Sally and some beautiful pictures, the way you describe everything is so delicate, you've got me excited about fish heads! 😅❤️
Sylvester the Cat used to say "sufferin' succotash". I loved that phrase even though I never knew what it meant. Reading this I couldn't help but hear Sylvester say "simmerin' supper dish". This piece simmers, in a really good way.