Fish soups are easier than you may expect — and full of flavour

In 1987, as part of the process of selfpublishing my first cookbook, I flew up to Hong Kong to check the pages as they came off the printer’s press. I’d never been to Hong Kong before and it was all very exciting. New smells, new tastes, the hustle of life on the street. In little lunch cafes in the shopping malls around Hong Kong you’d be offered things like duck tongues, marinated jellyfish and salads of black rubbery fungus. I’d never tasted anything like it.

One day the printer took me to a busy restaurant near the factory. A huge bowl of fish head soup arrived at our table. I wasn’t sure how to deal with all the bones. Everyone else seemed to be able to manoeuvre them around in their mouths and then neatly spit them out. That certainly wasn’t happening for me. Before I knew it, I’d swallowed a fish bone. Bread, I thought — that’s what we do. Eat bread to loosen the bone and get it down my throat.

“Bread, bread!” I called out to my waiter. It was obvious I was in some trouble. Bread is not a standard menu item in this part of the world and as no one besides the printer spoke any English — and his was extremely limited — they had no idea what I was talking about.

“Bed.” said the printer, “Bed.” He leapt out of his chair in a panic. “Hospital.” And off he rushed to find the phone. The last thing I wanted was to be taken off to some foreign hospital. I pointed at the bones in my soup bowl and motioned a stranglehold around my throat to the waiter.

“Ahhhh,” he gave me the thumbs up and raced out to the kitchen, returning quickly with a small glass filled to the brim with a watery black liquid. He motioned for me to drink it. I had no idea what it was, I just had to trust him. Down the hatch in one gulp. It was impossibly sour. Black vinegar, an entire glass of the stuff. But, like magic, the acidity softened the bone and down it slipped. Problem solved.

The next time I got a fish bone stuck in my throat, I sat in the ED department eating balls of cotton wool soaked in milk, passed to me by the nurse. “They’ll grab the bone and release it,” she said smiling consolingly as she passed yet another disgusting soggy wad of cotton wool. They did not. I went home and swallowed gallons of vinegar. Zero effect. In the end I needed a general anaesthetic to remove that nasty sharp piece of snapper bone that had lodged deep in my gullet.

These days there’s only one place you’ll find fish bones in my cooking — and that’s when making fish stock.