Genoese-style Fish Soup
- 3 ½ lb mixed fish for soup
- 1 lb mussels
- 8 cups fish broth
- 1 carrot
- 1 onion
- 1 stalk celery
- salt
- ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1 cup white wine
- 2 desalted anchovies
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1 sprig thyme
- 3 leaves of bay leaves
- 2 lettuce hearts
- 1 tbsp parsley
- pepper
- bread slice
- ½ tbsp onion
- ½ tbsp leek
To prepare this dish, it is necessary to use fish for soup, such as gurnard, scorpion fish, smooth dogfish, sole, red mullets, conger eel, flying squid and cuttlefish. Clean and carefully wash the fish, and divide those with tough flesh (cuttlefish and flying squid) from the others with tender flesh.
Toss the mussels in a casserole in little oil. As soon as the shells open, extract the mollusks and filter the liquid. Put almost all the oil into a casserole; as soon as it begins to smoke, add the flying squid and cuttlefish, mix well, add the chopped mixture of onion and the white of leeks, the lettuce hearts and the bunch of aromatic herbs. Season with salt and freshly-ground pepper and cook over moderate heat.
With the cuttlefish almost cooked, douse with the wine and allow to evaporate almost completely. Mix in the anchovy fillets well-desalinated and crushed in a mortar, and, immediately afterwards, the rest of the fish with tender flesh. Leave to gain flavor for some minutes. Pour in the fish stock, continue cooking over moderate heat for ten minutes or so, and then add the mussels with their cooking liquid, filtered.
Lightly brown in a small pan the crushed cloves of garlic in the remaining oil. Remove the garlic and pour the same oil into the soup, and check the salt. Put the slices of dry bread into individual soup dishes, pour on top the fish soup and sprinkle with chopped parsley.