Put some seafood into your soup pot
Seafood soups and stews fall into two categories: rustic, easy, comforting dishes with big flavors and a balance of seafood and vegetables, and richer, more refined and more labor-intensive affairs such as seafood bisques or French soupe de poissons and its Southern French counterpart, bouillabaisse. The latter are special-occasion dishes best left to restaurants with a budget for labor and specialty fish. It’s the rustic, country-style soups and stews that are fun to make at home, both for dinner parties and family meals.
These hearty soups don’t require elaborate fish stocks — which can be a good thing, as it’s not always easy to find the fish heads and bones that a good fish stock requires.
The procedure for two of these recipes, the Provençal fish chowder and the Veracruzana crab soup, is identical. You begin by making a robust tomato sauce base, then add water or a light vegetable stock, the additional vegetables and aromatics, bring the mixture to a boil and simmer until the vegetables are tender. Shortly before serving, add the fish or crabmeat.
For a bit more of the sea, there are anchovies in the tomato base that’s at the foundation of the Provençal fish chowder. As for semantics, I like to call this soup a chowder because, like a Manhattan clam chowder, it has a tomato base and an abundance of potatoes. But its hallmark Southern French flavors — lots of garlic, a good pinch of saffron, the perfume of orange zest and fennel — leave no doubt that the fragrant dish is decidedly Provençal.
As for the type of fish to use, you have lots of flexibility. The fish should be whitefleshed (not salmon), but your budget and the quality of what’s available can help you decide. I often use what fish stores call “chowder mix,” a low-cost mix of pieces of different fish; but tell the fishmonger not to include salmon or tuna because their flavors are too strong.
The distinctive flavors of the Veracruzana soup come from the minced olives, capers and pickled jalapeños that are cooked along with onions, garlic and tomatoes in the soup base. It may seem curious to find olives, capers and olive oil in a Mexican dish, but the cuisine of Veracruz has strong ties to the Mediterranean.
Both of these stews are perfect for big dinner parties. You can make them, up until the point of adding the fish or crabmeat, hours or even a day or two in advance.
A mussel stew with potatoes and sausage is better for smaller dinners, for four people, say, mainly because of the amount of space mussels require in a pan. The stew is inspired by a number of Portuguese and Catalonian seafood dishes that bring earth and sea together, usually in the form of sausage and seafood such as mussels or clams.
All of these recipes make wonderful one-dish meals — maybe follow with a crisp green salad. And if you want to get more seafood into your diet but you’re not a confident fish cook, this is a great place to begin.