My local hypermarket has a good seafood counter, although we’re 200Km from the sea, so I asked the woman running it to give me some ingredients for a soup for two people. By my reckoning, she overdid it a bit, but we both agreed that variety was an essential part of the recipe. Here”s what I ended up with, each in about 100gm portions:

• dorade (sea bream)
• farmed salmon (much cheaper than any of the wild fish)
• large tentacle (squid?)
• small mussels
• cooked prawnss (the only uncooked ones were too tiny)
• scallops

I also picked up some smoked haddock from the prepacked food shelf.

The rest came from my kitchen and garden:

• red-skinned potatoes
• butter
• garlic
• fresh herb (thyme?)
• sea salt
• fancy pepper corns with pink & red bits
• crème fraîche

I ended up with some ingredients left over – all the smoked haddock and mussels, and some of the fish and prawns, but this was intentional. I added a few each time I recooked the soup, so that it always had a fresh-tasting ingredient or two over a background of gradually merging older ingredients. That’s the way I do stock pots, and even commercial soups – even if it’s only to add a few slices of crisp vegetables.

So how did it taste? Juicy. To my surprise, the tentacle was not tough and rubbery in spite of its size. I’ve had some pretty tough, tasteless squid in my day, but this was a delight. First time round, the liquid of the soup was thinner than any chowder I’ve had in restaurants – but I could probably change that by mixing in a more floury potato that would break down and spread itself around.

By the third re-cooking (with the mussels and the rest of the prawns & scallops now in the pot), it was becoming more of a mature soup. Today, I’ll add some smoked haddock, but not too much because it’s salty.

For a style that is distinctly amateur and untidy compared with NotDelia, take a look at Man in Greasy Shirt (actually, a fleece pullover – it’s winter here):

Now go away and do a better job yourself.

Modern chowders, like bouillabaisse, are made to a wide range of recipes and have a host of cooks all claiming theirs is either the authentic or the best. Like bouillabaisse, chowder is also a meal whose origins are lost in ancient history, originally a poor family’s meal made from scraps boiled up in a big pot – in fact, it’s the pot that gave it its name.

There are 16th and 17th century records of chowder (from The French chaudière, the name for a big cast iron cooking pot) all along the French coast from Bordeaux to the north coast of Brittany, and across the channel in Cornwall. Although many of the early New England settlers came from Devon & Cornwall, they were of farming stock, and they don’t seem to have approved of the eating habits of the fishermen. They did enjoy eels, but they probably used to catch them in rivers. In the 1620s the Pilgrims fed clams and mussels to their hogs with the explanation that they were “the meanest of God’s blessings” – even though they were a major source of food for the local Indians.

If you’d like to check out a couple of chowder recipes, see how Not Delia rises to a speed cooking challenge from Ainsley Harriott.  An excellent, flexible recipe for boat food, in my view.

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.

***************************

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.

]]> http://www.newfreebooters.com/bouillabaisse-the-history-and-a-modern-recipe/feed 1 http://www.newfreebooters.com/figgy-dowdy-pudding-and-well http://www.newfreebooters.com/figgy-dowdy-pudding-and-well#comments Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:01:14 +0000 admin http://www.newfreebooters.com/?p=153 Continue reading →]]> Up on a hill in Cornwall, beside the road from Redruth to Lanner, there’s an ancient pagan well called Figgy Dowdy’s Well. It has a beehive stone roof and steps down to clear water, and used to be a favourite place for little girls to christen their dolls on Good Friday. The iron gate is kept locked to stop people falling down it, but the old rhyme suggests that it used to be locked in earlier days, for a different reason:

Figgy Dowdy had a well

On the top of Carn Marth Hill

And she locked it night and day

Lest they took her water away

She was also known by other names – Maggy Figgy, and Margery Daw – but ‘Daw’ means ‘sluttish’, so all names probably refer to a slovenly-looking woman.

In Nelson’s navy, Figgy Dowdy was the name given to a pudding, whose making was eloquently described in a captain’s table dinner scene in Patrick O’Brian’s novel Post Captain:

‘We take ship’s biscuit, put it in a stout canvas bag –’ said Jack.

‘Pound it with a marlin-spike for half an hour –’ said Pullings.

‘Add bits of pork fat, plums, figs, rum, currants,’ said Parker.

‘Send it to the galley, and serve it up with bosun’s grog,’ said Macdonald.

Alaskans, who still eat Pilot Bread made to the original English Navy recipe, will understand why it was necessary to pound the stuff for half an hour to break it up before mixing it with the other ingredients. What the conversation reproduced above doesn’t say is what the ship’s cook did with it – he wrapped it tightly in muslin and boiled it for a few hours.

Modern English and American recipes tend to use beef suet rather than the fat rendered on board from salt pork, but people in my part of France would have no trouble with the old recipe. Some of them still take advantage of the regulations that allow them to slaughter the family pig at home as long as they aren’t going to sell it to strangers, and the local supermarket always has 10Kg bags of salt for sale in the pig-slaughtering season.

If you don’t live in Alaska and you’d like to make your own hardtack (ship’s biscuit), try Mrs Beeton’s recipe:

1 lb Flour
2 oz Butter
1/2 Pint Skimmed Milk
Melt the butter in the milk, mix with the flour until smooth; roll it out thin, cut into circles, pierce all over with a fork, bake 6-10 minutes. (She didn’t have a thermostat on her oven – bake it rock hard, but don’t burn it.)

If you want to make the biscuits look really authentic, stamp them with a broad arrow (like the old prison clothes) and the letters RC (for the Royal Clarence victualling yard in Gosport).

You can make this on board, if you like. No fancy equipment needed.

Ingredients

75 grams butter

225 grams strong cheddar

2 tablepspoons sour cream (why do they put a sell-by date on this stuff?)

4 tablespoons Guinness

4 drops Tabasco sauce

2 tablespoons finely-chopped parsley

freshly-ground black pepper

Think you can manage all that? Right. Let’s go.

1. Cream the butter until it’s really soft (if the weather’s freezing cold, don’t be tempted to heat it – you’ll end up with ghee, and we’re not making a curry).
2. Add everything else and mix it all together, using whatever tools you usually use.
3. Pour the mixture into a large bowl or into a number of ramekins – whichever you fancy.
4. Cover the bowl or each of the ramekins with clingfilm and do what it takes to chill it for at least 2 hours. If you haven’t got a fridge, bung everything in a tough, waterproof plastic bag and hang it over the side or in the bilges.
5. When it’s as chilled as you’re ever going to get it, take the bowl or ramekins out, take off the clingfilm, run a knife round the edges, and tip the contents out onto a plate. Slice it and serve it with fresh, crusty brown bread.

What you drink with it is up to you, but I hope you’ll have finished off the original bottle or can of Guinness – it’ll be a bit flat by now.