Tastes Like Home

Hi Everyone, I’ve been confused about fish broth and steamed fish. When is a broth really steamed fish, and when is steamed fish really a broth? This might not seem like a difficult question, but I’ve discovered that it all depends on which Caribbean country you are from.

This all started because I wanted a dish comprised of a couple of fish heads gently cooked with lots of onions and herbs with a generous amount of broth to eat with my boiled ground provisions.

This dish was a memory from back when I was still in the single digits. I remember my dad making a fish dish exclusively of fresh red snapper, herbs, onions and tomatoes. Up until that time I had only had fish three ways – curried, fried, or fried and served in a tomato-onion sauce. When I tasted the dish my dad cooked I marvelled at the way in which both the fish and the translucent liquid it sat in tasted so flavourful. I heard my parents refer to it as steamed fish. But then as I got older, and travelled the Caribbean I started to hear about fish broth. I wondered, “Isn’t that the same thing as steamed fish?” I think in some way, I convinced myself it was and continued merrily with that interpretation until recently.

This week I decided to recreate my version of my dad’s cooking. So I bought some grey-snapper fish heads which I cleaned and placed into a pot of lightly saut