THE WORLD IN A STEW

In praise of bouillabaisse

“what is it like?” is surely one of the questions any piece of descriptive prose — such as an article about that storied Marseillais dish, the bouillabaisse — must answer. And to answer this, “What is it like?” adequately, it must in turn give its readers some sense of not just the fish stew’s taste, but its appearance, its texture, its aromas, its sheer nourishing heft. This is by no means all, for the merely sensuous cannot hope to capture the full essence of the bouillabaisse.

Why? Because one thing that must be said of it at the very outset — in advance of any attempt to describe this gastronomic gestalt at all — is that a true bouillabaisse is, in its own way, not so much thick fish broth into which chunks of yet more fish have been added, together with shingles of bread slathered with saffron-coloured and lemony-garlic flavoured goo, but a world entire.

What do I mean by this? Well, here’s an analogy: there are those countries — India,

Brazil, China, the USA — that, by reason of their vast size and economic diversity, attain such world-like status. Everywhere you look in the crowded Indian city street, India is reflected back at you; all tumultuous things and seething individuals having been made there. While, at the other end of the spectrum, it can be said of any complex object that it demands a world somehow commensurate with itself, so summons one into existence. For example, it’s hard to conceive of a whoopee cushion without a bouillabaisse-filled, Provençal bourgeois’ hefty derriere about to descend upon it, wouldn’t you agree? But the bouillabaisse itself cuts both ways — it’s a true synecdoche — and one can say of it, as one would of a grain of sand, “I will show you the world in a bouillabaisse… and show you, also, that the world is but a bouillabaisse.”

If this makes the bouillabaisse sound like the most substantial of dishes, then it’s only fitting. But besides this, the bouillabaisse is also the most active of stews, the very name of which is a compound of its own cooking method. Derived from the Provençal Occitan word bolhabaissa, one should perhaps always think of it as ever restive, although not running away with the spoon, simply being stirred by it until reaching the boil (bolhir, “to boil”), whereupon the heat is reduced (abaissar, “to simmer”). The single French word bouillabaisse captures the event in real time, forever. So, just as in the coda to Rupert Brooke’s celebrated poem, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, the clock always stands at ten to three, and there is indeed, always “honey still for tea”; so this very ascription constantly draws our attention to the precise moment at which fish chunks are added to the primordial stew, and the whole maddening mystery of life on this watery Earth gets going.

Or at least my life. We all have rites of passage, don’t we; those moments when we crossed a threshold into a whole new room of experience, and realised that henceforth life would

never be the same. For some of us it’s making love for the first time, for others going on an adventure, or learning to drive, or graduating from university. But for me, I truly became adult on a chilly, windy, Provençal spring day 35 years ago, when I entered a restaurant named, suitably enough, Au Royaume de la Bouillabaisse, which at that time occupied premises on the blustery seafront at Six-Fours-les-Plages.

Again: you can perhaps forgive the vagaries of memory (alternatively, since the restaurant has now closed, perhaps you’ll allow my poetic licence to replace its alcoholic one), but as I recall, we sat in a sort of glass-and-concrete box, surrounded by bubbling tanks within which were the relatives of the fish and crustacea we were about to eat. It was, if you like, a bizarre sort of mise en abyme: floating in a human tank, surrounded by fish ones.

Raindrops spattered the windows and out there, across the choppy sound, lowered the chilly dunes and dank marram grass of the Île de Grand Gaou, but, as the broth was decanted into our wide, white bowls, and the fish arrived — firm-fleshed, soft, gelatinous and shelled — piled high on steely salvers, it was as if some sort of boiler or stove had ignited in my belly, sending great waves of warm and fishy pleasure pulsing out to all my extremities. Yes, I confess: it was one of the great gastronomic coups de foudre: my falling in love with bouillabaisse.

Like all lain low by such obsessions, of course, I was ripe for it. I’d been visiting the French Mediterranean region for a couple of years at this stage, staying at the home of a wealthy Anglo-French friend. True, even in the early Eighties, the Riviera was already living on its past cultural glories, rather than cultivating new ones. The days when Scott and Zelda caromed along the corniche, Picasso painted it, and Willie Maugham fiddled about at Cap Ferrat were long gone; instead, at high season, as far as the eye could see, the beaches were subdivided into recliner-sized rental units, each occupied by a bourgeois with a giant and lurid cocktail. What passed for culture was indeed past, and in its slipstream had come petrol-scented marketing. Still, we did our best to recapture the bohemian wildness of that golden age, by diving off the Calanques near Marseille then — sunburnt and saltscoured — heading into town for long oyster and lobster lunches on this or that terrace, where we’d slump, stunned by the heat and the local rosé.

But that was in the summer when the last thing anyone would’ve desired was a hearty, hot stew. The bouillabaisse experience, as I say, came on a blustery spring day. I was already familiar with the warming and filling capabilities of a good soupe de poissons, served complete with grated Gruyère, rouille and croutons, but this was a further intensification, a sort of “squaring”, if you will, of the soupe, since the fish broth effectively doubles the fishiness of the bouillabaisse, given it contains in concentrated form the essence of the chunks of cooked fish that are added to it. And, if you are indeed what you eat, it made perfect sense that when I ate this dishthat’s-a-world-entire, I did indeed become more… worldly.

of course, the origins of this magnificent repast (regal enough, like Poseidon, to have had its own kingdom) lie in serendipity and toil. The omphalos (or navel) of the bouillabaisse’s being lies in the old port of Marseille, nowadays full of tourists, crap eateries and electric scooters, but once upon a time a harbour where fish were landed daily.

But which fish? One way of considering the bouillabaisse is to think of it as the Barbour jacket of French fish dishes. Originally, the bony and spiny specimens caught by the Marseillais fisher-folk were deemed too repugnant for clientele in tony restaurants, but this began to change at the end of the 19th century.

One can hypothesise that it was part of the wholesale move during this period for plebeian cultural practices to be adopted as mainstream, a tendency which intensified into the 20th century, and which now, in the current era, takes the form of the chief executives of Fortune 500 companies clad entirely in blue denim workwear.

Anyway, think of Vaughan Williams searching out obscure folk tunes, or the peasant sabots painted by van Gogh, it’s here that we should locate the bouillabaisse, which, in common with the waxed cotton jacket originally worn by Tyneside dockers, is something that was developed entirely for its utility, but which latterly became a fashionable accessory.

Actually, the comparison doesn’t end there: in common with the Barbour, the bouillabaisse envelops you in a pungent aroma — in the former’s case it’s one of paraffin, in the latter’s a bouquet garni — while warming you up from deep within. On a recent visit to Marseille, where my partner and I stayed in a hotel located in the belly of Le Corbusier’s celebrated Unité d’Habitation (a behemoth of a residential block, which also houses a restaurant called, suitably enough, La Ventre de l’Architecte), we ventured out to swim. There’s a little notch of a harbour called the Vallon des Auffes, around the headland from Marseille’s Old Port, and here are both ragged rocks and, in season, ragged rascals running and splashing around them, together with tall Dutch girls wearing nose rings.

I floated in the Mediterranean, which may’ve been the requisitely Homeric “winedark”, but I think not in a good way, especially given the amount of corkage. From where I modestly rocked and rolled, I could see the yet rockier isle, three or four kilometres off shore, that supports the bastion known as the Chateau d’If, wherein Alexandre Dumas’ fictional Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned. The count was in reality a commoner called Edmond Dantès, who purchased his title;

The omphalos of the bouillabaisse’s being lies in the old port of Marseille, nowadays full of tourists, crap eateries and electric scooters,

but once upon a time a harbour where fish were landed daily

really a similar sort of socially-rising parabola to the one described by my adored fish stew. Moreover, lazily hand-flipping through my own 180° parabola, I was able to look back at the shore, the little harbour, and the off-white jumble of buildings surrounding it.

In among them — as I knew — is Chez Fonfon, the restaurant where we were due to reenter the bouillabaisse universe in a couple of aperitifs’ time. Chez Fonfon doubtless has many claims to fame — and, as you’ll shortly discover, the establishment fancies itself as one of the principal arbiters of the echt bouillabaisse — but my familiarity with the restaurant is a result of its bulky rectilinear presence in the background of an early scene in The French Connection where two men are in urgent, furtive conversation. This is a scene which develops from a still earlier one on the ramparts of the Chateau d’If, where drug kingpin Alain Charnier (played by Fernando Rey) orders the assassination of an undercover detective who’s infiltrated his multimillion-dollar drug-running syndicate. Obviously, to compare a fish stew with a drug of addiction would be surpassing strange, and altogether unacceptable; yet I don’t think it’s contentious to assert that events both fictional and real permeate places and spaces: the spoon we raise to our lips is already infused with the past and brimming with the future.

So, sitting down in the upstairs room of Chez Fonfon, I can be partially excused for having asked the neophyte’s question of the waiter: what makes the bouillabaisse served here so very authentic? What, if he liked, was the quiddity of la bouillabaisse Chez Fonfon?

The answer came quickly — and it came forcefully. There were a number of restaurants in the Old Port area… five or six, he couldn’t be precise… but anyway, some of the most ancient and venerable, had, in the face of the tragic abasement of this proud dish by touristic clip joints, bonded together to create a chart, which set out the exact ingredients and method of preparation of the one, the only, the acceptno-substitute, Chez Fonfon bouillabaisse… My instructor ran on, telling me things I’d known for, well, ever since that windy spring day at Au Royaume de la Bouillabaisse, in Six-Foursles-Plages, when, hobbyist that I really am, I’d asked the waiter for the self-same instruction.

Anyway, no contemporary bouillabaisse comes without it, since the display of the fish to be eaten long since became so common, it’s been incorporated into the ritual. And so our waiter brought them, on their steely salvers — the rascasse, the turbot, the grondin rouge — and some conger eel, although not the head mandated by tradition. Indeed, the parade des poissons slightly threw me: these were not all the precise species mandated by… well, mandated by whom, exactly? The bouillabaisse is an extempore dish, so presumably even the chart’s rules must be broken from time to time?

Questions I would’ve posed to the voluble waiter, were my French rather better than it in fact is. As things stood, I’d to wait until my partner’s attention wavered away from a table in the vicinity. “See that couple?” she said. “He’s a typical sort of caillou…” (meaning “pebble”, a reference to his baldness) “…with a much younger pouffe-pétasse.” (Literally “pouf-bitch”, but “armcandy” captures the sense a little more kindly.)

“But she’s a street goddess — she can handle him.” She could handle her bouillabaisse as well: chunking the discoid croutons with rouille, positively hurling them into the broth, then attacking with spoon and fork, elbows raised.

I was fully prepared to do the same until, that is, ours arrived. Perhaps I hadn’t been rock ’n’ rolling in the Med sufficiently to build up my appetite; or, conceivably, it’s never a good idea to tackle a warming fish stew on a hot July evening. True, the first few mouthfuls were sublime, these several fishes, their textures and tastes, doubled and then redoubled by the broth, pulsing out towards my extremities, but all too soon those extremities were full right up, and shortly after that, my stomach felt as taut as a beach ball tossed between two Dutch girls sporting nose rings. (And those Dutch girls know how to inflate things.) It was as if I had, indeed, put on a Barbour jacket and zipped it up to the collar: I sat, looking out through the wide windows of Chez Fonfon, down onto the harbourside below, where a number of adipose motor launches were pulled up on the slipway. I felt quite as plump and powerless as they.

But then hunger is, I think, always the finest spice, bringing true piquancy to a chiller-cabinet sausage roll, or a bag of stale crisps. The bouillabaisse Chez Fonfon is undoubtedly superb but I was in no condition to appreciate it. After all, if the English middle classes walk for hours through cold and sodden fields on Sunday mornings, simply to work up the necessary hunger required to appreciate their brown beef and breeze-block roasties, then surely something roughly commensurate is required if a Provençal bourgeois wishes to experience the full savour of his bouillabaisse, rather than the ridicule of his fellow diners when he sits on the proverbial whoopee cushion. A vigorous swim out to the Chateau d’If and back would probably do the trick, or failing that, a brief career in the heroin trade. Any which way, the important thing is not to succumb to a sort of ragoût de l’ennui — as our poor waiter seemed to be. As we were rolling down the stairs towards the exit, my partner asked him whether he liked the signature dish he’d just served us.

He thought for a moment, then said: “I do love it — but I spend all day smelling it and touching it. To be frank, I’m pretty fed up with the stuff…” Yes, for this young man, bouillabaisse was continuing in its active mode, having transformed from staple food to delicacy, it had undergone a further bouleversement, becoming his daily bread, in every sense. And this, too, we must surely agree, is also what it’s truly like.

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In common with Barbour jackets originally worn by Tyneside dockers, bouillabaisse is something that was developed entirely for

its utility, but which latterly became a fashionable accessory