Hungarian Fish Soup

Apr 19, 2010 by glutenshmooten

Cookbook Challenge week 22, the theme is Red. When I think of red I think of beetroot, strawberries, tomato and paprika. Fortunately I couldn’t find a recipe that combined all of those ingredients (!) so I decided to have my main ingredient as paprika.

I have a beautiful Hungarian cookbook, Culinaria Hungary. My mum bought me this book when it became apparent that I wasn’t very good at learning the traditional Hungarian way of learning recipes: a bit of this, a bit of that, cook until it looks good!

It’s amazing what paprika will do to a dish – this recipe is so so so simple, minimal ingredients, just a dash of paprika totally makes all the flavour come through in the fish.

Ingredients

About 1.5kg fish (eg. carp, catfish, perch – you can use a mixture)

Salt

1 capsicum

1 tomato

2 medium onions

1 tablespoon sweet paprika (not the hot paprika)

1-2 hot peppers (optional)

Chopped parsley (my addition)

I have adapted this recipe a bit – it’s a very traditional recipe that uses all parts of the fish, I took the easy way out and just use fillets so made the recipe a bit easier as a result.

Scale and gut the fish, remove the bones and wash (to avoid this step I just used a boneless fillet of fish!). Cut the fish into bite sized pieces and season with salt. Chop the capsicum and tomato into small pieces, and slice the onion. Place the fish and onions in a pot and add enough water to cover. Bring to the boil, add the paprika and simmer gently for 1 hour. Add the tomato and capsicum  and cook over high heat for 20 minutes.

I added some chopped parsley to give the soup a bit more colour.