Recipe: Vinegar and Pepper Soup with Sliced Fish

This sounds a bit bizarre, but it's really nice — though you probably want to eat it one little bowl at a time, interspersed with other dishes in a Chinese meal, rather than all by itself. The recipe is originally from Kenneth Lo.

Ingredients

250g	Fish fillet (cod is good, any white fish is ok)
1t	Salt
1T	Cornflour
1	Egg white
3	Spring onions
1 litre	Stock
3 slices	Root ginger (skin removed, about 2mm thick)
0.5t	Ground white pepper
4t	Soy sauce (light)
5T	Vinegar (white wine vinegar works well)
(1T = one tablespoon = 15ml; 1t = one teaspoon = 5ml)

Method

Cut the fish into thin slices and rub with salt and cornflour. Then wet with the egg-white and leave for 30 minutes.

Chop the spring onion into 5mm pieces.

Put the stock and the root ginger slices in a pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 5 minutes.

Add the fish slices, chopped spring onion, white pepper, soy sauce and vinegar. Simmer for another 5 minutes.

Discussion

I suppose that being a fish soup, we should really use a fish stock, but I never have. I would use the brown chicken stock that I described here. Since this is a clear soup you probably want to filter the stock through a sieve lined with wet muslin to make it look more respectable. (If you are really keen, you might want to try doing this from frozen, leaving it to drip slowly into a bowl in the fridge. The result is better but it takes a long time: a day or two.)