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Bouillabaisse
Place a sufficient quantity of mixed fish, such as soles, whiting, gurnet and flounders into a saucepan, having cut them into pieces, and add some sliced onions, one or two sliced carrots, three shallots, two unpicked cloves of garlic, a bunch of thyme and parsley, five or six cloves, two bay-leaves, half a teaspoonful of capsicum, a little olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour into the above mixture a couple of quarts of water and boil gently for half an hour, the lid being placed on the pan. When sufficiently cooked drain the fish and arrange on a hot dish. Then mix a teaspoonful of saffron with the soup and pass through a pointed strainer into a soup-tureen. Serve the soup with the fish and a plate of croutons of fried bread or sippets of toast.
Oscar's version is a plain fish soup rather than the saffron-and-rouille production of modern Provençal cooking, and its one real flaw is the cooking time. Read the timing point first.
- Half an hour is too longThin white fish is done in five to eight minutes at a bare simmer. Build the broth with the aromatics for twenty-five minutes first, then add the fish in order of thickness and poach only until it flakes, or you will be lifting out shreds.
- GurnetAn old name for gurnard, a firm-fleshed bottom fish still sold in Europe and occasionally in US markets. Monkfish, red snapper, sea bass or rockfish stand in for it; keep at least one firm fish among the softer soles and flounders.
- CapsicumHere it means ground hot red pepper, i.e. cayenne. Half a teaspoon in two quarts is mild warmth, not heat. It is not paprika and not a fresh sweet pepper.
- Unpicked cloves of garlicUnpeeled. They go in whole, jacket and all, and are caught by the strainer at the end. Bruise them lightly first.
- Shallots and a bunch of herbsThree shallots means whole shallots, sliced. "A bunch of thyme and parsley" is a bundle tied with string, roughly six sprigs of thyme to a generous handful of parsley stems.
- Olive oil"A little" understates it. Reckon on a quarter cup, added at the start with the vegetables as the recipe directs; that fat is what gives the soup what body it has in the absence of any thickener, though at the gentle, lidded boil specified here it will not emulsify fully into the broth.
- SaffronA teaspoon of threads is a great deal by modern prices. A generous pinch, steeped for a few minutes in a ladle of the hot broth before it is stirred back in, gives the colour and scent this needs.
- Sippets, and the strainerSippets are small triangles or fingers of toast. A "pointed strainer" is a chinois; a fine mesh sieve does the same work, pressing the vegetables to extract their liquid but not pushing them through.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus fish will serve roughly six as a first course or four as a main, though the recipe specifies only "a sufficient quantity" of fish and gives no yield of its own. Serve the broth in bowls with the fish on its platter alongside, as written, rather than combining them.
Bouillabaisse belongs to Marseille and the Provençal coast, where it is traditionally described as a fishermen's dish built from the unsellable rockfish left in the nets; the name is generally traced to the Provençal bolhabaissa, understood as "boil and lower" — bring it hard to the boil, then drop the heat. What Oscar Tschirky prints here is the dish as it travelled: a French restaurant idea rendered for an American hotel kitchen, with soles and flounders in place of the rascasse, or scorpion fish, that Marseille cooks insist on. The saffron and the garlic survive the crossing; the shellfish, the leeks, the tomato and the fennel that many modern recipes treat as standard are all absent, and there is no rouille. Its appearance in a Waldorf book is of a piece with the dominance of French cooking in American hotel dining of the period.