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Bourride
(Marseilles.) Cut up and fry 2 1/2 pounds of salt water fish, with a crab, a bit of garlic, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, a clove, a glass of hot water, and a glass of cider. Boil 20 minutes, add a tablespoonful of flour, an ounce of butter, the juice of a lemon, the yolks of 2 eggs, pepper, and salt. Add the outside of a green pepper, chopped fine, and the pods of 2 ochra. Cook ten minutes longer, carefully, and serve in the same dish, hot.
A loose, Americanized reading of the Marseilles classic, with cider standing in for white wine and okra appearing from nowhere. The technique still works, but two lines need translating and one needs watching closely.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilOnce the two yolks go in, the broth has to stay below a simmer or it will curdle into threads. Temper the yolks with a ladle of hot broth first, stir them back off the heat, and hold the pan at bare steaming for the final ten minutes -- which is what "cook ten minutes longer, carefully" is telling you.
- "A glass"Genuinely imprecise in this book; period usage runs anywhere from a half cup to a full cup. Half a cup each of water and cider gives a broth barely covering the fish, a cup each gives something soupy. Choose by the width of your pan.
- CiderIn an American kitchen of this period this generally meant apple cider, sweet or hard. Hard (dry) cider behaves much more like the dry white wine a Marseilles cook would have used; sweet cider will push the dish noticeably toward apple.
- The fish"Salt water fish" means firm-fleshed sea fish, not salt cod. Monkfish, hake, conger, gurnard, sea bass or a mix of them is right; take the 2 1/2 lb as the weight of fish to be cut up and fried. Fry the pieces only to color -- they finish in the broth.
- The crabOne small whole crab, cracked, added shell and all for flavor; it is a stock ingredient rather than a portion of meat. A blue crab or small brown crab does the job.
- "Ochra" and "the outside of a green pepper"Okra, two pods, sliced. "Outside" of the pepper means the flesh and skin with the core and seeds discarded, chopped fine -- a sweet green bell pepper, not a chili.
- Flour and butterAn ounce is 2 tablespoons of butter; work it with the tablespoon of flour into a paste and whisk that in, rather than dumping dry flour into hot liquid.
- Yield and servingServes four as a main course. Traditional accompaniment is toasted bread rubbed with garlic in the bottom of the bowl; the instruction to "serve in the same dish" simply means bring the pan to table rather than straining broth from fish.
Bourride is the garlic-driven cousin of bouillabaisse, a Provençal fisherman's stew in which white fish is poached in an aromatic broth that is then thickened with egg yolk and, in Marseilles practice, a generous quantity of aioli -- the name is usually traced to Provençal *bourrido*, from a verb meaning to boil. What is interesting about this version is how far it has drifted in transit: the aioli has been reduced to "a bit of garlic," white wine has become cider, and okra and green pepper have arrived from somewhere else entirely. That drift is the character of the book, whose dishes are written down for American pantries, where hard cider was easier to come by than Provençal white and where okra was a familiar Southern thickener. It records what a foreign dish looked like once it reached a turn-of-the-century home kitchen, which is a different and often more revealing thing than what it looked like in Marseilles.