Soup & Stew Atlas · Soup
Cullen Skink
- Easy
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, wood-smoke running underneath, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 400g undyed smoked haddock, finnan haddie if the fishmonger is a poet
- 1 onion, minced; 1 leek, sliced fine; 40g butter
- 500g floury potatoes, diced
- 400ml whole milk + the haddock's poaching liquor; 100ml cream
- Chives; black pepper; crusty bread with more butter
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilKeeping the cooking liquid
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Poach the haddock in the milk with a bay leaf, 4–5 min; lift out; flake, discarding skin; KEEP the smoky milk. 5 min
- Sweat onion and leek in butter without color; add potatoes and just enough water; simmer until tender.
- Crush a third of the potatoes against the pot: the traditional thickener; no flour here.
- Pour in the smoky poaching milk and cream; return the flaked fish gently; warm through without boiling; chives and pepper over.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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