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Potage, Bouillabaise
Finely mince three leeks and two white onions, place in a saucepan with two tablespoons oil and gently brown ten minutes, then add two beans crushed garlic, two branches parsley, three tablespoons flour, and stir well while heating two minutes. Pour in a quart fresh, ripe, crushed tomatoes, two quarts water, two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon pepper, two saltspoons Spanish saffron, one bay leaf, a sprig thyme and one clove. Mix well and let boil fifteen minutes, add one and a half pounds fresh fish bones, boil twenty-five minutes longer. Strain the soup through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Break two ounces spaghetti in inch-long pieces, add to the soup and let boil twenty-five minutes. Remove, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A strained fish broth rather than the Marseille original: no fish is served in it, only the bones give flavour. Most of the work is in the two-stage straining, and the saffron is not optional.
- "Two beans crushed garlic"Read this as two cloves; "bean" here appears to render the French gousse.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of saffron is half a teaspoon of threads. Crumble them into a spoonful of the hot broth first so the colour and scent disperse.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The sieve takes out the bones and vegetable debris; the chinois catches the grit and fine sediment. Skipping the second pass leaves the soup cloudy and slightly sandy.
- Fish bonesAsk for frames and heads from lean white fish: sole, whiting, cod, snapper. Avoid salmon, mackerel and other oily fish, which turn the broth greasy and strong. Rinse the bones well and pull out any gills or dark viscera before they go in.
- Bone cooking timeTwenty-five minutes at a low boil is at the outer edge for fish bones; past about half an hour they give up bitterness and glue rather than flavour. Keep it at a bare simmer and skim.
- The spaghettiTwenty-five minutes will badly overcook broken spaghetti. Nine to eleven minutes in the finished broth is enough, and it is better to cook it separately and add it to the tureen if the soup is to stand.
- TomatoesA quart of crushed fresh ripe tomatoes is roughly two pounds, or one 28-ounce can with its juice out of season. Canned are the better choice unless the fresh ones are genuinely ripe.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid before reduction, so roughly six to eight generous servings as a first course. Check the seasoning again after straining, since the broth will have reduced.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, gathered dishes from across Europe for this book, and what he prints here is a townhouse adaptation rather than the Provençal thing itself. Bouillabaisse belongs to Marseille and the rocky coast around it, a fishermen's dish built from whatever the catch would not sell — rascasse, conger, weever — cooked hard and fast in oil, water, garlic, tomato and saffron and served as broth over bread with the fish alongside. The name is generally traced to the Provençal bolhabaissa, from boiling and then lowering the heat. Filippini keeps the aromatics and the saffron but throws the fish away with the bones and finishes with broken spaghetti, which turns the dish into a soup course of the sort an American dining room of the period could put in front of guests. That saffron is the one element he would not economise on: without it the broth is simply a tomato fish stock, and its presence is what still marks the recipe as Mediterranean.