Jamaican fish tea is a fragrant soup that buzzes with flavour and heat

Sitting around the dinner table with my wife s family one night, I mentioned to my mother in law born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica that I wante...

Sitting around the dinner table with my wife’s family one night, I mentioned to my mother-in-law - born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica - that I wanted to learn to make fish tea, the aromatic fish soup of her home country and a favourite of her father’s. Without skipping a beat, she said what became a popular refrain through all my subsequent recipe tests: "You’ve gotta use the head!”

Plenty of dishes from the Jamaican canon are well-known: jerk, obviously; oxtail; rice and peas. But when I married into a half-Jamaican family and started visiting the island regularly, I learned an important thing: Never sleep on the soups. And while I love Jamaican chicken soup and red pea soup, there’s something about fish tea that I find irresistible.

Where seafood soups and stews, such as bouillabaisse or cioppino, can feel like sticking your head in a rock pool - full of shells, chunks of fish and fishy flavour - sipping fish tea is like staring transfixed as the shadow of a fish glides by in clear blue water. The dish is named for its ample broth and because it’s often served in cups. "The liquid itself remains very thin,” said Riaz Phillips, the London-based British Caribbean food writer and cookbook author. "It’s watery, but it’s water packed with flavor.”

Each trip to Jamaica brings with it my first taste of a new dish in situ - there’s been glorious escovitch at Gloria’s Seafood City in Port Royal; perfect patties from the local bakery in rural Trelawny; callaloo-filled steamed bao at the Chinese Jamaican supermarket in uptown Kingston.

My first serving of fish tea came at the seaside restaurant at the storied Jamaican hotel GoldenEye, in the North Coast town of Oracabessa. Chef Laire Robinson grew up along this stretch of coast with a fisherman father. At home, "we had fish tea weekly or two times a week,” he told me, adding: "You might see these little kitchens on the roadside - little cookshops. Most of them are selling fish tea, especially if it’s a fishing village.”