Uha of Ruffe, Perch, Whitefish, and Burbot with a Clarifying Draw

History

Ukha is among the oldest documented Russian dishes, appreciated since roughly the 11th century. Its name is deceptive, for the word did not originally mean fish soup at all. Ukha once denoted almost any broth — a stock of wild game and herbs, or even the fat of boiled beef or chicken — so that every soup, whatever its ingredients, could be called ukha. The term is old and pan-Slavic, cognate across languages from Polish to Bulgarian and thought to descend from an ancient Indo-Aryan word for broth that also survives in Russian yushka. Only from the 15th century did Russians make ukha chiefly with fish, and by the end of the 17th century the name was used exclusively for fish soup; seventeenth-century texts still record "chicken ukha" and "duck ukha." Strictly, ukha is a fish dish made on a broth rather than an ordinary fish soup, and its governing rule is that the liquid stay clear and transparent and the fish not fall apart, achieved by simmering gently over a low flame. Small "trash" fish such as ruff make the base, with perch, whitefish, and burbot added for flavor; tsars from Ivan the Terrible favored ukha of sturgeon and sterlet. Molokhovets simply codifies this: recipe #117 builds its stock on ruff, clarifies it to transparency with pressed caviar, and finishes it, gentry-fashion, with Sauternes or champagne.

Ingredients

• funt whitefish and burbot
• funt ruffe and perch
• funt white roots
• onion
• greens bouquet
• grains allspice
• bay leaf
• funt pressed caviar
• stakan Sauternes or champagne
• lemon
• dill

Instructions

1. Fillet the fish; simmer the bones, skin, heads, and whole ruffe in water 2-3 hours until the ruffe disintegrate; strain.
2. Poach the fillets in the boiling uha 20 minutes, then hold them in cold salted water.
3. Clarify the broth with a pressed-caviar draw and strain through a wet napkin; boil once more.
4. Pour over dill and fish in the tureen; serve with lemon and pirozhki.