Bouillabaissez-moi

It is easy to stumble when talking about French food. The level of submissiveness you express when you make some sort of terminological gaffe when ordering in a French restaurant or talking about food with a francais is, in my experience, what will determine how cutting the inevitable rebuke will be. If you admit the impropriety of your culinary faux pas and cede to the authority of your interlocutor, you may just get away with a condescending reminder that you are not French and never will be. To call a bouillabaisse a fish soup is to risk an embarrassing miscategorisation for a bouillabaisse is neither a fish potage nor a consommé aux poissons, nor again is it a soupe de poissons or a bouillon de poisons or a pot-au-feu de poissons, all of which sit in the English lexical box marked ‘Fish Soup’. In brief, a bouillabaisse is a thick fish soup, a soupe, as a matter of fact, in which fish and crustaceans are poached; it is served with croutons and rouille.

Once upon a time, bouillabaisse de Marseille was a sailor’s meal that combined the best of day’s catch with saffron, garlic, tomatoes and pastis. Something happened and bouillabaisse turned into one of the showy standards of French cuisine, the signature dish of tough, brash Marseilles. I’d eaten restaurant bouillabaisse before and that was enough to convince me that it was a dish worth worrying about. So much so that I resolved to cook it at home a few years ago, not a particularly simple undertaking. To make the soup you need first to make a vat of stock out of the heads and bones of the fish, tomatoes, red capsicum, celery and so on. It is a dish which requires at least five fishes of different weight and texture; one of these should be an eel. Once the stock has been strained, generating a pile of fishy stench, you are ready to make the soup. Now that I set myself to recalling the matter, there are so many steps which precede the dishing up of the bouillabaisse, I will not labour to recount them. Hints and tips: if you are using a lobster (do), make sure you shut it firmly in the freezer…

The end product is a thick soup heady with saffron and garlic and olive oil and pastis in which the fish fillets are gently cooked, rouille, a thick, utterly divine mayonnaise made with reduced stock, garlic, red pepper, and croutons. If you use the amount of saffron recommended in most recipes (I didn’t), you will short-change yourself a decent pair of shoes. It takes hours and makes a filthy, odiferous mess but it’s worth it and the very concoction of it all, longwinded and convoluted as it is, provides an excellent pretext to feed large numbers of people and toast every single one of the fishes in the sea, as well as the great institution that is French cuisine, to wake up to a pile of dishes and people and a hangover with the pleased glazed morning after glow which follows a night before of solid eating.

All of this prior knowledge was largely irrelevant on the Quai du Vieux Port: eating bouillabaisse in Marseilles was an ecstatic experience, one from which I may never recover. The meal eaten by Kym and I was as described above but prepared by a chef to whom the gods bequeathed a gift of dangerous culinary prowess. We met the chef as we stumbled delirious out of the restaurant and garbled thanks and appreciation at him. He got out of the way quickly, fortunately enough, for had he not done so, I would have found the franÁais with which to propose all sorts of terms in exchange for a lifetime of bouillabaisse. There were photos of him with beaming French starlets on the walls of the corridor leading to the loos so I guess I wasn’t the first. The thing is, the photos I took don’t really say much about the meal.
Here’s the rouille and croutons, for example, which don’t look as spectacular as they were. Note the cloves of garlic piled ready to scrape over the croutons. It would be wrong to post a photo of the soup, every mouthful of which filled the cavities in my head and chest with sensation. Instead, here is your author, wits long lost, smiling like a fool at a rouille bedecked crouton floating in the soup of my dreams.
Although there was no calorific justification for ordering dessert, there was no way we could leave without sampling the bouillabaisse dessert. Two courses of bouillabaisse weren’t enough. The dessert ditched the fish, happily, and kept the key flavours of the meal – a sublime pastis ice, strawberries and raspberries muddled in warm olive oil, and oranges dressed with saffron. By this time, our meagre store of eloquent superlatives had dwindled to gasps of ‘gosh, mmm,’ ‘wow, best aaah,’ ‘most golly, yeah.’

Oh yes, and if you were wanting to look up bouillabaisse online, you’d go somewhere like www.bouillabaisse.com, wouldn’t you? That’s the website for our restaurant, Le Miramar, bouillabaisse central and highly recommended.
The fact that the complementary truffle toasts with a drizzle of very old balsamic vinegar, the scent of which I would follow through the most arduous of obstacle courses, warrant only a closing note should seal the recommendation of the bouillabaisse.