The Perfect Meal (14 page)

Marseilles, the Sailor’s Bouillabaisse

Fewer people agree on how to make bouillabaisse than on the recipe for the perfect martini, though there is consensus that it tastes better if it includes the rascasse, a spiky creature, mostly head, also known as the scorpion fish. Some of the restaurants Angela, Cyril, and I cruised that afternoon boasted of using rascasse in their bouillabaisse, but what convinced us was the family eating on the quay. With napkins stuffed into their collars, mother, father, grandma, and three children attacked a basin of bouillabaisse as big as a washtub. Clearly these people would never accept less than the real thing.

A traditional dockside bouillabaisse, 1910s

We took a table next to them. Assuming we were all agreed, I said, “
Bouillabaisse pour tous les trois, s’il vous plait
.”

Cyril harrumphed. “You don’t mind if I order my meal?” he said stonily. After staring at the soup-spotted menu, he said, “
Je voudrais le poulet rôti et frites
.”

The waiter raised his eyebrows. Chicken and chips, in a seafood restaurant? As long as he lived, he would never understand these
rosbifs
(Brits).

M
ore than thirty years later, sitting in a Paris where, at the time of that earlier trip, I’d never remotely imagined living, the taste of that bouillabaisse came back to me.

The few Paris restaurants that advertised the dish served up a couple of fish fillets in a dish of sludgy pumpkin-colored soup. Bouillabaisse didn’t flourish beyond sight of the Mediterranean. It needed sun, garlic, oil, and, above all, rascasse.

Our friend Tim was in town from Australia. A few years ago, he and I had made a memorable expedition one Saturday morning to buy a Matisse as a gift for his wife.

“How would you feel about running down to the Riviera for bouillabaisse?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “Love it!”

A week later, we were rocketing across France, headed for Sète.

What a contrast to my first trip, in our old VW. Then, we had stopped overnight in little pensions and, on a few occasions, even pitched our tents at a campsite. Cyril, inevitably a former Boy Scout and member of his university trekking team, shamed us with his taut guy ropes, drum-tight canvas, and state-of-the-art sleeping bag.

Back then, the trip took a week. Now, three hours after climbing aboard the TGV at the Gare de Lyon, Tim and I stepped off into the briskly breezy but sun-bright streets of Sète.

A few apartment blocks had replaced buildings demolished by wartime bombing, and pleasure boats rather than trawlers lined the canals. Otherwise, little had changed. Walking to our hotel, we found the street taken over by a market and wove the last hundred meters through stalls selling crimson tomatoes, piles of onions, skeins of garlic, and giant oysters the size of coffee bowls.

By the time we reached the harbor, an hour later, our appetites were sharp. The dockside restaurants looked just as they had in the 1970s, down to the same ocean-blue awnings, tables spilling onto the cobbles, and menus under glass, all advertising, in four or five languages, the true, real, and genuine bouillabaisse.

“Do you remember which one you ate at?” Tim asked.

“Not really.”

We chose one almost at random. “Let’s try the lunch menu here,” I said. “If it’s good, we can come back tonight for bouillabaisse.”

We ordered the
plateau de fruits de mer
, served on the traditional steeple-shaped wire rack. Its five ascending terraces held oysters, shrimp, crab, a lobster, mussels, and the saltwater crayfish called langoustines. On the side were bowls of aioli—garlic mayonnaise—and the mixture of red wine vinegar and chopped shallots that accompanies oysters everywhere in France.

“Not bad,” Tim said, cracking a lobster claw. “I wonder if their bouillabaisse is as good.”

We buttonholed the waiter for information. He in turn called the owner over. I explained our search.

“M’sieur, I assure you, we serve
le vrai bouillabaisse
.
Le vrai de vrai
.”

He pointed to a color photograph on the menu. It showed a tureen of deep red soup flanked by small rounds of toast, a pile of grated Gruyère cheese, and a dish of the chili-flavored mayonnaise called
rouille
—literally “rust.” Next to it, a platter was heaped with whole cooked fish, crabs, and other shellfish.

“But this is just
soupe au poisson
,” I said.

Any large restaurant in France served the same dish. You spread
rouille
on a crouton of toast, heap on some cheese, float it in the soup, then try to scoop it out before the bread becomes soggy and disintegrates down the front of your shirt. The addition of fried fish changed it not at all.

The owner looked stung. “Not at all, m’sieur. Note the fish.” He pointed to the heaped platter. “
Saint Pierre, grondin, lotte . . 
.”

“Rascasse?”

He looked uncertain, darted back into the kitchen, and returned a few moments later.

“Our chef tells me that, regrettably, the rascasse is not always available. Nonetheless, we stand by our claim that this is the authentic bouillabaisse Sètoise.”

“Bouillabaisse Sètoise? Then there are others?”

“Of course, m’sieur. Bouillabaisse Marseillaise, Bouillabaisse Italienne, Bouillabaisse Espagnol . . .” Not forgetting, I thought, North Sea Bouillabaisse.

So what had I eaten all those years ago? I remembered a single dish of red earthenware, from the depths of which we dredged shrimp, mussels, crab claws, and dripping gobbets of fish. Perhaps the chef had been from Marseilles or even Barcelona or Genoa—quite possible in this cosmopolitan town. Had I eaten Spanish or Italian bouillabaisse rather than the Sètoise version? Or had the years merely blurred the edges of memory, so that what I remembered and what I ate no longer coincided?

If I did serve the dish as part of my banquet, clearly I would have to invent a version of my own that exhibited the qualities I remembered from that first delirious
grande bouffe
.

A
fter lunch, Tim and I took a stroll through the narrow streets running up to the mountain that towered behind the town. Big plane trees shaded park benches where old men drowsed and mothers rocked babies in their prams. In one square, we found a flea market, as sleepy as the rest of the town. Like
brocanteurs
all over France, the vendors had brought folding tables and picnic lunches. They lingered over their cheese and red wine, hoping somebody might show interest in their chipped plates, rusty tools, and piles of old magazines.

I noticed Tim was looking a little green.

“Could we find a café?” he asked.

“You feel like a coffee?”

“Not exactly.”

At the first café, he bolted for the toilets before we’d even sat down. He returned ten minutes later, even paler.

“I need to go back to the hotel,” he said. Something from that
plateau de fruits de mer
had given him a savage case of Sètoise stomach.

By nightfall, he was a little better, though still shaky. Though I’d waited for the same bug to hit me, it never did. I felt fine.

“Don’t let me stop you,” he said. “You came here to eat bouillabaisse. You should do it.”

An hour later, I was back at the dockside. I chose a restaurant at the end of the row and sat down. The waiter handed me a menu. There they were, all the usual suspects:
plateau de fruits de mer
,
soupe au poisson
,
langoustines
,
huitres
—and, of course, bouillabaisse.

“
Je vous écoute
,” said the waiter, pencil poised—I’m listening . . .

I closed the menu. The very thought of seafood turned my stomach.

“
Poulet rôti
.”

“
D’accord. Et avec ça?
”

“
Frites
.”

“
Oui, m’sieur. Poulet rôti frites
.”

You could hear the exasperation in his voice. Chicken and chips!
Rosbifs!

Eleven

First Catch Your Elephant

I could eat a horse and chase the driver.

Traditional British saying

C
ooking in France has a lot to do with class. That’s true of all nations, of course. But in Anglo-Saxon countries, wealth shows itself in the richness of the food—fat, butter, sugar, cream—and in the quantities—steaks that overlap the plate, sandwiches so stuffed with filling that one can’t get one’s mouth around them,

In France, the richer you are, the leaner and more tender the meat you eat, the whiter the bread, the finer the wines, but the smaller the portions. Bread, wine, and meat are a measure of success. When someone who has lived well falls on hard times, the French say, “He ate his white bread first,” while “to eat meat every day” is equivalent to the American “catching the gravy train.”

Well into the nineteenth century, protein of any kind was a luxury. The poor subsisted on vegetables and grains, a diet that kept energy low and left them too tired after a working day to protest about the miseries of existence. Vegetarianism has never caught on in France because vegetables are regarded as food for the poor. To eat meat, the leaner the better, signifies prosperity. Dine with any middle-class family and you’ll likely be served fatless, flavorless roast veal, with a few green beans and perhaps potato purée, followed by cheese.

Outside the cities, the rule of meat with every meal relaxes somewhat, and the definition broadens to include parts of the animal at which city dwellers would turn up their noses.

This point was illustrated by the experience of a family in the country that, having lost its money, decided to economize by firing the cook.

“We’re terribly sorry,” the wife explained. “It’s just that food has become so expensive.”

Relieved she wasn’t being dismissed for incompetence, the cook said, “But madame, you should have told me! Give me a few weeks. I can save at least enough money from the housekeeping to pay my wages.”

She began in the fields and roadsides near the house, scanning the shoulders for snails, picking the arugula and dandelion that grew wild, as well as herbs such as marjoram, chives, and mint. The leaves went into salads, the stalks into stocks and soups, while anything left over was dried to use later.

At the market, she ignored the best fruit and vegetables. Bruised apples and overripe tomatoes were not only cheaper, and sometimes free, but their ripeness made them more suitable for sauces and purées. At the butcher’s, she chose cheaper cuts that could be stewed or braised. She also insisted that the butcher wrap the bones and trimmings and add anything that his less frugal clients had left behind. (“For the dogs,” she told him, though nobody was fooled.) Bones and scraps were roasted for the fat, then boiled to make stock for soups—all but the suet, the hard white fat from around lambs’ kidneys. That was minced raw and substituted for butter to make particularly rich pastry and puddings.