Tradition, appetite keep Marseille’s ‘golden’ fish soup alive
November 12, 2006 - Agence France Presse
Once considered a poor man’s dish and now a rich man’s treat, bouillabaisse, Marseille’s traditional fish stew, has always stopped this southern French port city from toppling into the culinary abyss.
With its mix of pungently-rich, long-simmered fish broth served with potatoes and copious amounts of fleshy-textured local rockfish, such as conger eel and scorpionfish, the Provencal dish is an inextricable part of the city’s soul.
The emblematic “golden soup,” formerly a daily staple for fishermen who cooked it at sea, became a family favorite but now relies on a handful of restaurants to uphold its traditions.
“It’s part of the list of the city’s cliches, but it’s also something real,” Pierre Psaltis, a Marseille native and food critic for the regional daily newspaper, La Provence, said, between slurps of broth at the bouillabaisse restaurant, L’Epuisette.
“Up to eight years ago, food in Marseille was an apocalypse,” he added, referring to when he began noticing that the city’s chefs had started to improve their repertoire aside from the famous soup.
Bouillabaisse, whose name may come from the French words ‘bouille’ which means to boil and ‘baisse’, meaning to reduce, may have been brought to France by Italians or Greeks, according to different versions of its origins.
The secret to making a good bouillabaisse is even the subject of classes taught at Marseille’s Le Miramar restaurant.
Thirty-three-year-old chef Christian Buffa takes ‘students’, both locals and tourists, through the whole process, starting with picking out the right fish at the Old Port market, in an initiative introduced by the city’s tourism office.
In the hundreds of years of its history, bouillabaisse appears to have proved the exception to Psaltis’ ‘disaster’, maintaining its popularity and place in the hearts of the Marseillais.
“Including the broth, we use 80 kilos (176 pounds) of fish a day, easy,” said Denis Blanc, head chef at Chez Fonfon, one of Marseille’s bastions of bouillabaisse.
“It’s easy to make,” he said. “Easy”, as defined by Blanc, boils down to: “use the freshest possible fish” and “you’ll need a full day on your hands to prepare it.”
This may explain why bouillabaisse is now regarded as a special treat for locals and visitors alike, with a bowl at a restaurant costing about 50 euros (63.50 dollars) per person.
Chef Blanc demonstrated the lengthy process of making it by sauteeing onions, fennel, garlic and fish before deglazing the whole thing with white wine and, over the course of several hours, adding fumet (fish stock), cooking it down, adding more stock, reducing again, then straining it.
Served with toast rounds smothered in a spicy, garlicky mayonnaise known as rouille, the combination creates an explosion of taste.
Finally, the fish—Chez Fonfon’s bouillabaisse includes five different kinds—is cooked in the broth for the last 15 minutes before the whole dish is served with a good helping of ceremony, while diners spoon up a bowl of broth.
“First, you get some broth in a bowl that welcomes it,” a Chez Fonfon waiter said. “The broth allows you to be able to endure the wait while your fish is being prepared,” he added, with a slight smile.
The presentation, where the cooked fish arrives on a silver platter before being deboned and portioned tableside is a far cry from the soup’s humble origins.
“In the beginning, it was what fishermen ate for lunch on the boat,” said Frederic Rossy, a fourth-generation fisherman who docks his boat in the harbor, a stone’s throw from his customers at Chez Fonfon.
“It was a dish for us, the workers.”
But Rossy and his son Henri seem to understand that quality has its price.
“The fish has got to be fresh,” said Henri, who works on the boat with his father, “otherwise the bouillabaisse is not good and it would be like eating old boots.”
“You pay for the quality you get,” he said.
This story also ran with: The Tocqueville Connection, The Nation, Swaf News, Oman Daily Observer.
