Just What Is a Bouillabaisse, Anyway?

Cooks in the South of France have strong views about bouillabaisse, their most famous seafood dish, and no two agree on all the details. They will argue with passion over such questions as whether a scrap of orange peel should be included. But they all seem to agree on the basics:

This is a fish soup with which are served, separately, some of the fish which have been cooked in it.

A wide variety of sea fish must be used, carefully selected and including some with firm flesh (the ones to be served separately) and others which just disintegrate into the broth, plus probably a crab or other small crustacean.

Olive oil, tomatoes, onion, garlic, herbs and saffron are essential ingredients.

Fierce, rapid boiling is needed in order to amalgamate the olive oil with the water.

The accompaniment is rouille, a sauce which has the consistency of a mayonnaise and is made with pounded garlic and red peppers plus bread crumbs, olive oil and fish broth.

Is any more exact definition needed? No, I used to think; to attempt one would lead straight into manic discussions about scraps of orange peel.

Then I came across a recipe for bouillabaisse which gave me a real jolt. It is in a book aptly called “An Odd Volume of Cookery,” by Louise Lane Morrisey and Marion Lane Sweeny, published by the otherwise reputable firm of Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1949.

The recipe begins: “Put one can tomato soup and one can pea soup in top of double boiler and heat.” The ingredients do not include fish, herbs or olive oil. Tut, tut, surely this was a glaring misuse of the name bouillabaisse. But the incident made me decide to find out when the name first came into use and whether it has always meant what it means today in the South of France; and the results of my research yielded several surprises.

First, the name bouillabaisse is not very old. The best French dictionary for this sort of question dates the first recorded use at 1837. In fact, the compilers seem to have overlooked a book published at Nimes in 1830, “Le Cuisinier Durand.” This gave two recipes under the name Bouil-abaisse, and in them the dish we know today is quite recognizable. But the way the title was spelled on this first appearance caused me to stay with the dictionaries a little longer and to establish the derivation of the name.

I found that I had to stay with the dictionaries for hours. I had unwittingly strayed into an arena where the swords of etymologists have glinted, and still glint, in endless strife. There are at least four explanations of the name. I was tempted by the one that makes it a corruption of bouillir (to boil) and peis (Provencal for fish). After all, boiling the fish is just what everyone (except Morrisey and Sweeny!) does. But the people of Provence continue to call the dish Boui-Abaisso, and it seemed unlikely that they would have confused peis with abaisso. So I settled for another option, which derives the name from bouillon abaisse (literally, “broth lowered,” i.e. you reduce the broth during cooking).

I then asked myself why a dish that has all the hallmarks of an origin in antiquity (it is generally supposed that it evolved from the dish that fishermen made for their supper on the beach with what was left over from their catch), did not manifest itself in anything like its present form until 150 years ago. One answer is that up to then olive oil would have been too valuable for use in everyday cooking, and that the tomato (though it had arrived from the New World in the 16th Century) was not adopted as a foodstuff in France until the 19th Century. Another could be that Provencal cookery, so famous now, was hardly recognized at all as a cuisine until the political and literary movement to establish a Provencal identity gained momentum towards the end of the 19th Century.

My next surprise came when I studied early recipes for bouillabaisse in order to see what they said about the choice of fish. Prowling round Marseilles, I had been frowning at the menus of the numerous tourist restaurants round the old harbor, which advertise “ bouillabaisse with langouste “ and that sort of thing. Langouste (the spiny lobster) is one of the most expensive seafoods. How wrong, I thought, to tart up a simple fisherman’s dish with such a costly ingredient! But when I looked back at the early recipes I found that langouste was there indeed as a suggested ingredient, and so was sea bass, which is just about the most expensive fish. So I had to take the frown off my face. Worse still, I discovered that these early recipes included a bouillabaisse made with freshwater fish, or a mixture of these with sea fish. So, originally, it was not even a pure seafood dish!

The next, and greatest, disillusionment came when I studied afresh the two classical books on Provencal cookery, those of Reboul (1985) and Escudier (1953). Here I found recipes for bouillabaisse without any fish at all. There is, for example, bouillabaisse borgne (“blind bouillabaisse “) , featuring potatoes and eggs in place of fish, and bouillabaisse aux epinards (with spinach). Red in the face, I now realized that Morrisey and Sweeny were within their historical rights in proposing a fishless bouillabaisse, even if their recipe was misguided in other respects.

Of course, none of this alters the fact that bouillabaisse is generally thought of as, and generally is, a seafood dish.

Which leaves us with one problem. These recommendations for the choice of fish always include, in France, a rascasse rouge; this is the finest and largest scorpion fish of four species in the Mediterranean. It ventures some way out into the Atlantic, but is rarely available in Britain and unknown in North America. Is it really essential? I would say no. There are rockfish of similar characteristics in all parts of the world.

The real impediment to making an authentic bouillabaisse outside of the Mediterranean is not the lack of any ingredient, or difficulty in technique; it is the absence of the Mediterranean sunshine and environment which make eating bouillabaisse there, in an open-air restaurant, such a delight. California is one place where a comparable ambiance exists, so there--if all my reasoning is correct--it should be possible to replicate the bouillabaisse experience.