Tinned salmon soup

We have recently discovered this fine soup, more or less by accident.

Start by making part 1 of a chicken fricassée. The general idea is to gently boil a chicken, chopped into half a dozen pieces, in water, together with a selection of vegetables. Some people add herbs and spices. Other people add a chicken stock cube to make the chicken taste more chickenee. Best not to add milk or cream.

When the chicken is cooked, remove it from the saucepan. Liquidise the broth. If you were not making soup, you would now be ready to go onto part 2 of the fricassée.

As it is, we discard the chicken and concentrate on the two pints or so of broth. Peel about two pounds of potatoes and cut into chunks of about two cubic inches each. Boil them in fresh water for about 10 minutes. Then transfer to the broth, bring to heat and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Do not cook the potatoes from scratch in the broth, as this will either take a very long time, damage the flavour & texture of the broth or both.

While the broth and potato chunks are simmering, open a tin of salmon. It does not need to be a particularly posh tin of salmon, although if you are a touch squeamish about fiddling around with fish, the posher the better. Drain the water out of the tin and dump the fish out on a chopping board. Break it open, remove skin, surface fat, brown flesh from the lateral lines, bone and any other bits and pieces. Just leaving the pink stuff. Coarsely flake it with a fork and add to the soup. Simmer for a further couple of minutes and serve with fresh white bread (if available).

An alternative to tinned salmon is to use left over grilled salmon, or if you really want to splash out, buy some raw salmon, express. This last will need to be lightly poached before you will be able to flake it. But it all tastes much the same once it is in the soup.

Reheats quite well, bearing in the mind the capability of even cooked fish to go off.

PS: posh tinned salmon tends to look like a crosswise slice of salmon fitted into a tin. Less posh salmon is more like chip board with all kinds of bits and pieces, probably from more than one salmon, pressed together and so on into the tin. It also tends to be a much paler pink.