Buesumer Fish Soup

Büsumer Fish Soup

Büsumer (or Büsumer Deichhausen) is situated on the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany and is apparently the source of today's soup. I haven't made very many of the fish soups in The Soup Book, mainly because I haven't felt sure that I would be able to get the necessary ingredients. There are thirty-two fish soup recipes and so far I have made just five; Büsumer fish soup is my sixth.

The listed ingredients include carrots, potato, onions, vegetable stock, a bay leaf, haddock or pollock, lemon juice, prawns, chestnut or button mushrooms, and fresh dill. I bought the fish in a recently opened fish shop. I was agreeably surprised that the fish monger had both haddock and pollock on display. I asked him what the difference was between the two. He said that pollock was "meatier," more like cod. When I told him I was following a soup recipe, he immediately urged me to buy the pollock. He also shelled the prawns for me. I used some vegetable stock I had made last month. MH will be delighted to read that I found chestnut mushrooms, but not where she suggested!

I had been making my mind up this morning about which soup I would cook and left The Soup Book open at pages 242 (the Büsumer fish soup recipe) and 243 (Hamburg eel soup). When the older offspring eventually appeared downstairs, he looked over the open book and called out, "Which one are you making?" When I told him, his response was: "Oh yes!" That said, he was late home for dinner this evening but he did say the soup was "lovely."

This evening I was telling the spouse about choosing pollock for the recipe, to which he replied, "We [his parents and he] used to feed pollock to our cat Susie." Later on he added that "Ruby" (his secretary/colleague) eats pollock. (So Susie's fish was not far above Ruby's.) Anyway, his reaction to the finished soup was positive - he'd like to eat this soup again. It was tasty.

While at the fish monger's I spotted cod roe, something I haven't eaten in years. Am I brave enough to try it again just fried?

A Swarm of Bee-Related Items

 The spouse sent me this link to some bee-inspired furnishings at Stockholm Design Week. He also sent me a link to a wood preservative. I think that might be a reminder to finish my bee box. 


I have just finished re-reading a book I came across last summer: Ferenc Karinthy's "Metropole." It really impressed me and the second reading was just as affecting. The link above will bring you to a rather inaccurate synopsis of the novel, but you'll get the gist of it. The book group hosted by my local library will be discussing "Metropole" at its next meeting. The bee-/honey-related quote is as follows:

There were as many kinds of women on display as there were colours of houses: honey blondes, young girls, women with slant eyes and combs in their hair like Japanese geishas, even one coal-black beauty wearing a heavy silver necklace. 

Meanwhile another book group I participate in will be discussing Edmund de Waal's "The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidd en Inheritance." Just this morning I opened it up and started to read and quickly came upon a bee/honey reference on page 2. The quote below even refers to soup-bowls. How apt!

I had been making pots since I was a child ...I left school early at seventeen to become apprenticed to an austere man ... He taught me respect for the material and about fitness for purpose: I threw hundreds of soup-bowls and honey-pots in grey stoneware clay and swept the floor.

And finally, the spouse gave me a copy of Carol Ann Duffy's "Love Poems" earlier this week. This book contains some of her most popular poems. The final selection is from "The Bees". I have just come across a link to her poem "Virgil's Bees" (see my blog entry of 16th January 2010) and have discovered that she is a support of the Natural Bee-Keeping Trust. The lines below are from Leda (in "Love Poems").

I knelt like a bride as bees prayed in the clover
and he rose, huge, an angel, out of the water, 
to cover me, my beaked, feathered, webbed, winged lover