Gently poach undyed smoked haddock in milk and aromatics untils almost cooked. Meanwhile saute floury potatoes finely diced with a generous quantity of butter. Season well. When potato is starting to catch and the fish is nearly cooked, strain the poaching liquor into the potatoes. Top up with boiling water as neccessary.
While the potatoes finish cooking flake the fish into the pot, taking care to remove bones.
Final check on seasoning then serve.
Simple, quick and delicious.
Embellishments
Why improve on perfection? Well heres a few tweaks that can be added without compromising the integrity of the dish.
- Other vegetables
- Leeks, sweet potato or finely diced carrot only. It's tempting to seize any opportunity realise the five a day target, but to my mind they need to be mildly flavoured and always be subservient to the potato. (The rare occasion in my cooking when onion and garlic are barred.)
- Sweetcorn
- Now we are in controversial territory. Is it a genuine regional dish or a bastardised fusion with the American chowder? If your sensibilities allow it, I would urge you try it. With two caveats: you must go the whole hog and include bacon, and use corn on the cob (stick the husk in the soup at the same time). Is it still cullen skink? Probably not, but it's damn good.
- Bacon
- Or any pork product.See above. I pretty much always use finely diced chorizo during the potato saute phase, because it's nearly always to hand and gives little bit of colour and a lot of flavour to the end result. Absolutely essential if you have the added sweetness of sweetcorn.
- Turmeric
- Ok, a bit of weird addition. I have a family history of certain cancers, a number of epidemilogical studies have touted turmeric as a protection against these. So that was the initial motivation for sticking it in. But it's become a regular on it's own merits - cheap as chips, gives a bit of visual depth - especially complementary with the little red flecks of chorizo, and may even end of make all that butter and fat more digestible. But keep it small folks! A couple microgrammes too much and the soup will look radioactive.
- "Punching the flavour"
- To be honest, this shouldn't be neccessary. But if the opportunity is there, why not give it a try. Some additions that have seemed to work: corn husk, nam pla (very small), parmessan rind. I guess we're looking for added umami more than anything else.
When you have such a wonderfully reliable recipe as Cullen Skink it can be tempted to chuck whatever else work in there as well. And because the Skink is so forgiving, you'll get something that is perfectly edible, but shouldn't claim the same illustrious heritage.
Here I'm thinking of things like the following:
- Prawns
- We typically have some to hand either frozen or dried and it's tempting to use them to stretch out a soup under construction. Just to my mind the sweetness of the prawn is redundant in the Skink, far better to save them for a spicy curry or tangy bouilliabaise.
- Other smoked fish
- The most widely available fish in Ireland is smoked cod. This is one of the blandest fish around smothered in smokey bacon crisp essence then painted mahogany. It is not a welcome addition to any meal.
- Salmon has it's own merits, but would overpower this soup before it had even rang the doorbell. The applies for mackerel and kippers.
...a reactionary diatribe in favour of a nativist Cullen Skink. With sweetcorn. And chorizo. And turmeric.
Nom nom nom
