Name: Fish Soup with Summer Vegetables and Marigolds
Yield: serves 8
Ingredients: ½ cm/¼ inch slice of ginger; 2 handfuls freshly shelled peas; 2 to 3 tablespoons rapeseed oil; a generous fistful of parsley, mint, dill, coriander, spring onion tops, watercress and purslane; petals of three or four marigolds; 1.5 kg/3 lb fish bones or one bony fish, cleaned and chopped; 1 onion, peeled and chopped; 1 teaspoon grated ginger; 2 or 3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed; 4 small squid, cleaned and cut into rings; 2 baby leeks, trimmed and sliced; a handful of parsley, dill and mint stalks; 4 new potatoes, peeled and diced; 1 kg /2 lb scaled, cleaned and skinned white fish, 2 or 3 varieties; salt; 1 handful finely shredded spring cabbage; pepper; 2 celery stalks, trimmed and sliced; 2 small turnips, peeled and diced; 1 celery stalk, chopped; prawn shells; 1 handful asparagus tips, if available

Preparation info

serves
8

Difficulty
Complex

Appears in

The Scented Kitchen

By Frances Bissell

Published 2012

About

This is based on one of the few recipes in which Mrs Beeton uses flowers; two marigolds to flavour and colour a tureen of eel soup. Whilst she does not acknowledge the recipe’s origins, elsewhere one sees references to Jersey eel soup, a virtually identical recipe. Because of its gelatinous quality, conger eel was considered to be highly nutritious, rather like calf’s foot soup. However, eel is no longer widely available, and I have substituted other fish. In fact, this is