Soupe de poisson - your eyes are the balance

A week after our suq adventures and tagine-ing, I send Kenza, our Airbnb host, a message.

I have a super random question. Alex and I have been dreaming of your Mum's fish soup! If she happens to make it again, could we come and learn? No worries if not, just thought we'd ask.

A message so peppered with 'outs' that it almost doesn't exist. The food blogger that excuses herself out of the kitchen.

Thankfully, Kenza sees through my message.

Bring your notebook

She says in return.

Soupe de poisson

Why this soup in particular?

We had had it in small bowls, steaming, before our 'viande' tagine meal the weekend before. The first sip was a revelation. A smooth tomato base, dense with seafood intensity, chilli heat and lemon zing. I'd never had anything like it.

Essaouira, a Moroccan town on the Atlantic coast, is renowned for its seafood. Stalls sell sea-to-table meals by the kilo. Fish pastilla, fish tagine, fish of the day.

It’s a town that stretches along a length of sandy beach where tea sellers make laps of lounging tourists, horses run themselves to work, locals pace their daily footsteps towards the dunes.

Where the beach meets the medina the port pier hooks round.

A world encompassed.

Boats, three abreast, push into the concrete pier. A high wall offers respite from the Atlantic swell. Women wait, flanking the lines of fishermen passing boxes hands to hands to hands from the bellies of their boats onto the harbour's edge. Plastic boxes of sardines, eels, sea bream.

Seagulls. Everywhere.

Essaouira port

Lorries idle. Stalls fashioned from a table, front legs shorter than the back, balance slithery fresh haul under umbrella shade for passers-by to peruse. One man has fashioned sardines into stars.

Sun gazing sardines

Every day after four, sit on the beach you can see the boats heading into port. Some hang back, sneaking into the channel between the sand and Mogador Island. Seagulls hang in the air silhouetted against the sunset like a spinning child's ceiling decoration.

Sunset fishing boats from the beach at Essaouira

Amina manages to squeeze the essence of this into a bowl.

As we potter around Amina's kitchen chopping parsley, peeling garlic, measuring paprika, I ask Kenza if she ever felt pressure to learn how to cook when she was younger.

"Yes" she says "but in Morocco we say you have to have a small head to learn. You can't be arrogant."

Amina adds to Kenza's English in French "Au Maroc, en general, on travaille avec le goûte, et les mains, et l’intuition. On ne fait pas le mesure. C'est l'habitude."

Nets at Essaouira port

"عينك ميزانك" says Kenza.

Aynik myzanuk.

Your eyes are the balance.

We eat a double soup dinner, with harira as our starter, and soupe de poisson to follow. Small shrimps shelter at the bottom. Maria, Kenza's sister, quietly calls them a little present from the sea. Toasted baguette slices with a harissa and mustard mayonnaise add crunch.

It is a balance of ego, of place, of flavour that makes this soup so moreish, understated in its ingredients, humble and powerful.

Cooking with Amina and Kenza, walking along the port, drinking this soup. It is not just my eyes that are the balance, but these experiences. Encompassing, new and generous. This brings me into being, into balance.

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Soupe de Poisson

Like previously, this is shared with you as it was with me. Adjust depending on the taste of your ingredients. I would really recommend reading ahead on this one!

• 3 tbsps of blended and sieved cherry tomatoes

• Olive oil - 4 tbps

• Head and skeleton of a medium, not too oily, fish

• Half a take away tupperware of shrimp skins

• 2 bay leaves

• 1 fennel bulb

• Leeks (small) x 2

• Red onion 1 quartered

• 8 garlic cloves

• Carrot chunked

• 1 big tomato

• 1 red bell pepper

• 1 tablespoon tomato puree

• 2 sprigs thyme

• Chilli powder, ‘a little’ - 1 tsp

• Paprika, ‘a little’ - 1 tsp

• A sprig of thyme

• 2 tsps fish sauce

• As many cooked and shelled prawns as you like

  Method

• Put the all the ingredients apart from the cherry tomatoes into a large saucepan with some oil

• Fry until they are ‘smoked’ stirring regularly so that they don’t catch. This will take abut ten minutes.

• Prepare the cherry tomatoes, if you need to. Soak them in boiling water for 10 minutes, then blend and sieve them.

• Add three tablespoons of the cherry tomatoes into the pan with the other ingredients and enough water to fill your pan.

• Add the fish sauce. Bring to the boil for 15 minutes.

• Remove the thyme and skeleton. Blitz until smooth.

• Pass through a sieve.

• Add juice of one lemon, and the shrimps.

• Thicken with a little cornstarch by adding a little of the soup to a tablespoon of cornstarch, stirring until smooth, and adding it back into the soup. Stir until thickened. Repeat if you would like.

• Taste, adjust for seasoning and spice. Serve with a quartered lemon.