Waterzooi (fish) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Waterzooi is a Low Countries dish thickened and whitened with egg yolk and cream. The form said to be original is the fish version, and its setting is Ghent, a city of canals and rivers. The Leie and the Scheldt cut through the town; grain-grinding water mills stood along their banks, and the rivers ran thick with perch, pike, barbel, eel, and burbot. Fishermen near the old Braempoort are remembered as boiling these familiar river fish in a pot and drawing them together with egg yolk and cream, and that is told as the beginning of the fish waterzooi.

The river fish at its center were fish of the place, long at home in the Leie and the Scheldt. The eggs that bind it, the dairy that lends it richness, and the leeks and root vegetables that season it were likewise local ingredients rooted in the fields and farms of the Low Countries. Fish taken from the river went into the pot, and the broth they made was drawn together with egg yolk and cream until it turned pale. That white simmer closed softly around the sweetness of the river fish.

The name waterzooi is thought to come from the medieval Dutch sode (zode, soot), meaning to boil. It appears in the written record in a 1748 Flemish text—the year by which the word certainly existed—though the dish itself is said to reach back into the Middle Ages.

The waterzooi famous today as a Belgian dish is, for most people, the white soup made with chicken (Kippenwaterzooi). But the view that this is not the original carries weight.

As it is told, the original was a dish of river fish (Viszooitje), a fishermen's home cooking born in Ghent in the medieval thirteenth or fourteenth century. The switch to chicken came far later, in the nineteenth century. By a leading account, the rivers around Ghent were fouled by industrial pollution in that period, and the river fish—burbot above all—vanished. With the river fish that had been its center no longer to be had, a chicken version stepped in, spread in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and in time pushed the original aside to become the standard.

The fish version and the chicken version are stylistic variants, divided by whether the central ingredient is river fish or chicken, while the technique of finishing the dish white with egg yolk and cream is shared by both. The fish version is the original of this family, the chicken version the branch that split off from it. A Ghent origin, with the fish version as the older form, is carried by the city's own tourism material among others. Yet the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and the years when the rivers fouled and the fish went, have come down as things told rather than dated, and no single year has settled out of them. What is certain is that by 1748 the word waterzooi had been set down in a Flemish text. How much further back into medieval Ghent the dish itself reaches is not known.