Crab soup

This recipe makes a very rich, thick crab soup suitable for serving as a starter. Since the recipe calls for a lot of crab meat - to provide the flavour, it can be a rather expensive dish.

1 large crab, dressed, or 200 g crab meat

1 large carrot

1 medium onion

300 ml fish stock

100ml dry white wine

50 g plain flour

160g butter

50 ml double cream

20 ml tomato puree (about 1 tablespoon)

About 1 teaspoon chopped fresh coriander (or parsley)

• Separate the coral from the rest of the crab meat (if you are using crab meat and have no coral set aside about 75 g of the meat). If you are not familiar with shellfish the "coral" is the grey - green stuff that looks like a lot of small soft balls.
• Chop the carrot and onion into small pieces (about 5mm in size). Put the carrot and onion in a heavy bottomed pan on a very low heat with no liquid added, cover, and allow to sweat for about 5 minutes. Add the crab coral, or the meat you set aside, the tomato puree and the fish stock.
• Leave,covered, to simmer for an hour, check from time to time that the vegetables are covered with liquid and add a little water if necessary. Meanwhile, saute the remaining crab meat in half the butter.
• Pour off the stock into another pan and pass the solids through a sieve you should aim to reduce the amount of solids to much less than half during the sieving. Take care to pass as much as possible through the sieve as much of the flavour and texture of the soup comes from these pureed solids. Use a spoon to work the solids around the sieve and to make them into a puree fine enough to pass through.
• All the carrot and the crab coral should go through the sieve - you should only be left with some of the onion. Measure the amount of liquid you have - if it is more than 500ml then reduce it, by boiling to about 450 ml.
• Prepare a soft roux with the remaining butter and the flour in the pan you used to saute the crabmeat. Simply melt the butter and then add the flour and stir on a low heat for about 2 minutes - allowing the flour to attain a light golden colour. Take the pan off the heat and stir in a little at a time the liquid that was passed through the sieve.
• Make sure you keep the texture of the mixture very smooth - do not allow any lumps to develop. Now transfer the mixture to the saucepan, add the cooked crab meat and the white wine, br ing to a boil and cook for a further 3 minutes.
• You should now have a very thick, pinkish coloured, soup. Finish the soup by stirring in the double cream and immediately serve in small coffee cups with a sprinkle of chopped coriander on top.

Serve 4