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Chapter 12 | Bouillabaisse
- University of New Hampshire Press
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“I loved the fishwives. They were a breed apart: big, loud, and territorial , they screamed at each other in nasal accents.‘When one of them dies, there’s always another one just like her, ready to take her place,’ an old pêcheur told me. They were a great resource for me, even though they didn’t always agree with each other,” Julia Child wrote in her autobiography, My Life in France.1 She and her husband,Paul,had moved from Paris to Marseille with“their taste buds poised for new flavors.”2 “So what was the Real McCoy bouillabaisse recipe?” Julia asks in the chapter titled “Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise?” The answer is that correct, authoritative, absolutely definitive recipes for bouillabaisse are like opinions: everybody’s got one. This reveals one of the things that bother her about the French: they are all so dogmatic. The other thing that bothered her was that, because she was a foreigner, they thought she knew nothing, and at first they were right. But eventually she knew more than they did,“because I had studied up on everything”3 How did she solve the bouillabaisse problem for her American audience? Bouillabaisse runs from page 52 to page 53 of Master‑ ing the Art of French Cooking. On page 53 of my copy are a few light lines of scribbling that could only mean one thing. The book came out in 1961, and my copy was from the tenth printing, in August 1965. My daughter would have been about one and a half to two years old. There is no food stain with the light scribble. No doubt I thought of making bouillabaisse and realized that, for the time being, I just couldn’t pull it off. I can picture myself paging through the book, pencil in hand to make a shopping list, and my daughter making the task impossible.Not to mention the fact that I probably couldn’t have afforded to buy a lobster, let alone the Bouillabaisse 180 , i , l o b s t e r time to spend on making the dish. The faint scribble is my toddler ’s signature. Julia begins by saying that you can make as dramatic a production as you like, but you should keep in mind the origin of the soup: it was made as a Mediterranean fisherman’s meal from the day’s catch, or what part of it wasn’t sold, probably combined with leftovers. Onions and leeks, garlic and tomatoes, water, parsley , bay leaf, thyme or basil, fennel, saffron, orange peel, salt, pepper , and six to eight pounds of fish and shellfish—she provides a list of more than twenty to choose from, including lobster—are called for. Even pasta is a possible ingredient. A number of other American Francophiles have faced the bouillabaisse conundrum. One of them, Alice B. Toklas, wrote: “In France there are three different kinds of Bouillabaisse—the unique and authentic one of Marseille with Mediterranean fish, the one of Paris made of fish from the Atlantic, and a very false one indeed made of fresh-water fish.”Toklas has no problem with French dogmatism,maybe because she has something of a proclivity for it herself. Witness the beginning of her instructions: “The fish should be more than fresh, it should be caught and cooked the same day.”4 In the 1920s, Toklas and Gertrude Stein lived in Saint Rémy de Provence for one summer and into the winter. From Saint Rémy they drove the sixty miles to Marseille two or three times every month for bouillabaisse at the town’s best restaurants. Alice’s bouillabaisse recipe is not for beginners. She calls for at least five and preferably seven or more kinds of fish, not counting the lobster, crab, and clams. The compulsory freshness is so important that she repeats it—in fact, she does not believe it can be repeated too often. What goes without saying is the fact that the cook is responsible for scaling and beheading, if not killing, the fish.“Take 5 lbs. gurnards, red snapper, red fish, mullets, pike, turbot and dory, wash, scale, cut off the fins and heads,” she writes.5 Some fifty pages earlier,she has confided that the kitchen is a scene where crime is inevitable. When she started to cook seriously, she says, is when her experience of murder in the kitchen began. In Alice’s bouillabaisse the lobster is boiled twice—first it is simply...