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Bouillabaisse
(Marseilles.) Cut up into pieces and remove the bones from 3 pounds of fish,--say, one pound each of cod, halibut, and bluefish, although any fresh fish in due proportion will answer. Add 6 shrimps or 1 lobster or 2 crabs, cooked, and cut into large pieces, 1/2 pint of olive oil; fry lightly, and add 1 lemon and 2 tomatoes, 1 onion and 1 carrot, all sliced, 1 pinch of saffron,--as much as lies on a ten-cent piece,--a bayleaf, and some parsley. A clove of garlic is used, unless the casserole is rubbed with it before cooking. Stir for 10 minutes; add 1 cup of stock and 1 glass of white wine or cider. Cook 15 minutes longer, pour out into a bowl, place slices of toast in the casserole, and return the fish and vegetables, allowing the sauce sufficient time to soak into the toast, and adding salt and pepper to taste.
XMAS CARP (as cooked in Poland and Italy on December 24, for supper.) Clean and scale the fish,--any white fish may be substituted,--cut it into slices, and fry it with onion, parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper. Add 1/2 pint of white wine to every 2 pounds of fish and cook for 10 minutes, then put the dish in the oven and bake for half an hour or until tender. Add 2 lemons sliced, and a cupful each of chopped almonds and currants. Cook long enough to soften the latter, adding stock if not moist enough, and serve in a deep dish. FISH (as cooked in Russia Easter Eve.) Chop sufficient cold fish, boiled previously in water and vinegar, with onion, carrot, and herbs, then freed from bones and skin. Mix with as much mayonnaise dressing as will cover and set on ice 2 hours. Melt some aspic jelly and whip it very stiff, and fill a mould shaped like a cross in alternate layers of jelly and fish. Set aside to harden and turn it out on a bed of lettuce leaves garnished with a border of whole hard-boiled eggs. The originality of this quaint dish lies entirely in the shape of the mould, which must be a square or Greek-cross shape.
The page runs three fish dishes together; the notes below deal chiefly with the bouillabaisse, with a word on the two that follow it. The whole thing is built on a single principle: everything is fried in oil first, then cooked briefly in a small amount of liquid, so the finished dish is a thick, oily broth rather than a soup.
- "Casserole" means the panAt the period this was written the word still commonly meant the stewpan itself, not a covered baking dish. Use a wide, heavy saucepan or braiser you can fry in and then return the toast to.
- Half a pint of olive oilThat is a full cup, and it is not a misprint — the emulsion of oil with the wine and stock is what makes bouillabaisse what it is. If it reads as too rich, 1/2 to 2/3 cup still emulsifies properly.
- A glass of wineAn unstandardised measure in this period; cookbooks of the day often reckoned a wineglassful at about 2 fl oz, while an ordinary drinking glass would be considerably more, so the quantity is open to judgement. "One cup of stock" is 8 fl oz. Fish stock or shellfish stock is much better here than water, since the recipe has you bone the fish.
- Saffron on a ten-cent pieceA 1900 dime was about 18 mm across, so this is a generous pinch — roughly 1/4 teaspoon of threads, crumbled. Steep it in a spoonful of the warm stock before adding rather than dropping it in dry.
- Fifteen minutes is too long for everything at onceCod and halibut in large pieces will take 6 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer; bluefish somewhat less. Add the thickest pieces first and the thin ones near the end, and put the already-cooked shellfish in only to heat through, a minute or two. Boiling hard will break the fish into threads and toughen the shrimp or lobster.
- The fishBluefish is oily and strongly flavoured and is now a regional catch on the US east coast; monkfish, sea bass, snapper or conger all work in its place. Any mix of firm white fish plus one richer fish keeps the balance the recipe is after.
- Lemon and garlic"1 lemon... sliced" means peel and all, which over the twenty-five minutes of cooking the recipe calls for turns faintly bitter. Slicing it thin and removing the slices before serving, or using zest and juice, gives a cleaner result. Rubbing the pan with garlic, as suggested, gives a much lighter garlic note than a whole crushed clove.
- Toast and servingThe bread goes into the pan and the sauce is poured over it to soak; serving the broth over bread rather than floating bread on top is the usual Provencal practice. Stale country bread, dried out in a low oven, holds up far better than soft toast. Three pounds of fish plus shellfish serves four to six.
- The two dishes that followThe Christmas carp recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, will suit the half hour. The Russian Easter dish relies on aspic and mayonnaise and must stay refrigerated throughout; if you build it with commercial mayonnaise and a firm gelatin aspic, keep the mould cold and serve it the day it is made.
Bouillabaisse belongs to Marseille and to the fishermen's habit of cooking the unsaleable part of the catch in seawater and oil on the beach; the Provençal name bolhabaissa is usually explained as "boil and lower" — bring it to a hard boil, then drop the heat — which is a cooking instruction rather than a description of the dish. Classic Marseille versions insist on rascasse (scorpionfish) and other rocky-shore species that were never exported, so nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English and American cookbooks routinely substituted whatever the local market held; cod, halibut and bluefish here point to a north-eastern American market. This book belongs to the genre of the travelling cook's notebook, where each recipe carries a place-name as its authority, and the page's habit of grouping Marseille bouillabaisse with Polish Christmas Eve carp and a Russian Easter cross of jellied fish shows the organising idea: fish dishes gathered less by technique than by the calendar and the coastline they came from.