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Bouillabaisse
Take three or four pounds of fish: whiting, sole, small haddock, red mullet, and a very small conger eel or a portion of one. All these are to be cleaned, cut in slices, and their bones removed; two dozen mussels are to be added. Put into a stewpan two onions sliced, two tomatoes peeled, a carrot sliced; then, in a coarse net bag, the following:--two bay-leaves, two slices of lemon, half the zest of a Seville orange, two cloves, a little thyme, several sprigs of parsley, a clove of garlic, two red capsicums cut, and a little saffron; and salt and pepper, and a little pimento. Place the pieces of fish over these, pour in six table-spoonfuls of olive oil; add three pints of water, with two or three glasses of white French wine; cover, and let all boil well together for half an hour. The whiting, however, should be put in only a quarter of an hour before finishing. Serve the whole in a soup tureen, with slices of toasted bread apart, and place them in the tureen before filling.
A late-Victorian English reading of a Marseille dish, and closer to the real thing than most of its contemporaries. A few of its instructions need rethinking, and one of them is the whole point of the dish.
- Boil it hard, and mean it"Let all boil well together" is not loose language. Bouillabaisse depends on a rolling boil to emulsify the olive oil into the water so the broth turns opaque and slightly thick rather than separating into oil slick and fish water. A gentle simmer gives you a thin, greasy soup.
- Half an hour is too long for the fishThe recipe already hedges by holding back the whiting, but sole, red mullet and small haddock are all done in eight to ten minutes at a boil. Build the broth with the eel, onion, tomato, carrot and aromatics for twenty minutes, then add the firm fish, then the delicate fillets, then the mussels for the last three or four minutes until they open.
- Conger eel and the fish listConger is the traditional firm-fleshed backbone of the dish and is rarely sold outside coastal fishmongers now; monkfish tail or gurnard does the same structural job. Three to four pounds of mixed fish, boned and sliced, feeds six generously with bread.
- Capsicums and pimento"Two red capsicums cut" most likely means fresh hot red peppers rather than sweet bell peppers, though Victorian use of "capsicum" covered both. "A little pimento" in a British book of this date is most likely allspice berries rather than paprika or pimiento peppers.
- The net bagA coarse net bag is a bouquet garni sack; muslin, a tea infuser ball or a square of cheesecloth tied with string does the same. Saffron included in the bag will still colour and scent the broth, though threads loose in the pot give slightly more flavour.
- Seville orange zestBitter Seville oranges are a short winter season only. Substitute the zest of half a regular orange plus a strip of lemon zest, or a small piece of dried bitter orange peel, which several spice merchants still sell.
- Glasses of wineA "glass" of wine in Victorian recipe writing is roughly 2 fl oz, so two or three glasses is about half a cup to three-quarters of a cup. Three pints of water is British Imperial, so about 1.7 litres.
- The breadToasted slices go into the tureen first and the broth is poured over. Use a dense country loaf or the soup will disintegrate it; a day-old crumb holds up better than fresh.
Bouillabaisse is a Marseille fishermen's dish, generally traced to the practice of cooking the unsellable rockfish left in the nets in a pot of seawater with oil and whatever aromatics were to hand. The name is usually explained as coming from the Provençal for "boil" and "lower" or "settle" — an instruction sequence rather than a description, which fits a dish whose defining technique is the violent boil that binds oil and water. By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary the soup had travelled from the quayside to Parisian restaurants and then into English cookery books, and English versions had to work around the absence of the Mediterranean rockfish — rascasse, weever — that give the original its character. This version's substitution list, leaning on whiting, sole and haddock while keeping the conger eel and the saffron, shows a compiler who understood which elements were negotiable and which were not.