Sail with New Freebooters

There are many poor people’s meals that have been transformed into haute cuisine, with expensive restaurants and celebrity chefs vying for the right to claim that they are the only ones to offer the real thing at outrageous prices. Bouillabaisse is one of the better-known.

Tradition places the origins of bouillabaisse with the Phoceans, an ancient Greek people who founded the port that is now Marseille around 600 BC. It was a fish stew known as kakavia , which the Roman goddess Venus may have fed to Vulcan.

Today’s bouillabaisse was created by Marseille fishermen (or, more likely, their wives), using that part of their catch which was not worth taking to market - mostly bony fish and the tinier crustaceans and molluscs. They boiled them in sea water, adding fennel and garlic. In the 17th century, after tomatoes were introduced from America, these became part of the dish.

In the 19th century, Marseille became prosperous and restaurants began to serve an up market version of bouillabaisse to their patrons. They used fish stock instead of seawater, and added an exotic and expensive spice - saffron.

Now that it was an upper-class dish, bouillabaisse spread first to Paris then right around the world, with its ingredients being modified to use whatever was locally available.

The name of the dish comes from the way it is made: stock is brought to the boil, one set of ingredients is added and the pot is allowed to drop off the boil, then it is brought to the boil again before adding the next ingredient. The process is repeated as necessary, depending on the cooking times for each set of ingredients.

Normally, the stock is served over bread or toast and rouille (a garlic mayonnaise with saffron) and the fish is served separately. Here is a modern recipe based on the one in Petit Larousse de la Cuisine, a French cooking dictionary:

INGREDIENTS

rascasse (scorpionfish)

grondin (gurnard)

lotte (monkfish)

congre (conger eel)

dorade (sea bass)

merlan (whiting)

saint-pierre (John Dory)

étrilles (small crabs)

onions

celery

garlic

leeks and other vegetables

bouquet garni

Bone and trim the fish.

Brown the onions, celery and garlic in olive oil, then add the heads & trimmings of the fish. Cover with water, bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Now go through the ‘boil - add next batch of ingredients - repeat’ cycle in order of size of the fish so that the biggest bits get cooked longer. Keep the most delicate fish (the saint-pierre and the merlan) for now. Add saffron and cook over high heat for about 8 minutes. Add the saint-pierre and the merlan, then cook for another 5  to 8 minutes until everything is tender.

Drain off the broth, put a slice of bread covered in rouille at the bottom of each diner’s bowl, then pour broth over it.

Serve the fish and crabs on a separate plate.

Optionally, add orange peel and white wine or cognac to the broth before the final cooking stage.

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This business of taking the pot on and off the heat sounds suspiciously like mumbo-jumbo to me. Since the dish was originally cooked over an open wood fire producing a steady heat, tossing handfuls of wet fish into the pot would have brought it off the boil (and still will if you leave the hob controls alone). It would then be a case of waiting until it reached a rolling boil again before tossing in the next lot. NotDelia is away from home for a few days, but I’ll ask for her professional comment when she gets back.