I have for some years been attempting to forge a New Year’s Eve tradition of making a big pot of bouillabaisse and refusing to go out anywhere. As you are in all likelihood well aware, there is perhaps no surer way to begin your year with a fresh measure of dyspepsia and regret than to heed your friends’ naive eleventh-hour petitions to go out to this or that party that supposedly will be “fun,” and I like to think that a giant fish stew and a surfeit of wine should provide adequate protection against such poor decision-making (lamentably, I have yet to be vindicated in this).
In inviting someone over for bouillabaisse, however, I sometimes take pause and ask myself, “Is this really bouillabaisse I have to offer?” I would hate to have someone over under false pretenses, and the invocation of this very festive-sounding French classic certainly excites more, uh, excitement than the pedestrian “Hey, want to come over for some miscellaneous fish stew?” But miscellaneous is, in a truer (well, let’s say true-ish) sense, exactly what bouillabaisse is, isn’t it? Bouillabaisse is to Marseille what the po’ boy is to New Orleans, in many ways: an intensely local, identifiable, signature dish that resolutely refuses to be pinned down as to of what exactly it is comprised. A sort of culinary shibboleth, but one that does not admit any single authoritative form, while still providing ample opportunities to decry the inauthentic as it moves beyond its locality (or, arguably, as its localities multiply). Larousse Gastronomique reads, “There are as many ‘authentic’ bouillabaisses as there are ways of combining fish,” a strangely even-handed assertion for a culture far better known for its prescriptive than descriptive temperament in matters gastronomical. But it gets at what is most interesting about bouillabaisse. Like many now-refined and canonized dishes, bouillabaisse began as poor people’s food, a fisherman’s stew made up from the many bony and bellicose-looking sea creatures that were deemed not fit for market. The name itself derives from the French verbs bouillir (to boil) and abaisser (to reduce), which one must do a lot of when dealing with a motley assortment of animals that all demand their own cooking times. Bouillabaisse, it could thus be said, is more a method of preparation than a recipe per se.
Even the 1980 Marseille Charte de la Bouillabaisse stops short of imposing a strict definition, although it recommends minimum requirements for the inclusion of certain types of fish. Rascasse, one of the fish long held to be essential to bouillabaisse, is usually translated into English as “scorpionfish,” although in French rascasse refers to a more taxonomically irreverent collection of species ranging across several genera, and even whole orders. Hence, in spite of the translation, the fish in the category “scorpionfish” may not perfectly align with those considered rascasse and thus essential to the identity of the soup. But maybe less important than what rascasse really is, is the historical fact that local nomenclature does not always transpose neatly across languages and locales, and often still less across folk and scientific (ichthyological) classificatory systems. Granted, even the most devoted stickler is unlikely to cry bullshit so long as the fish is spiny and poisonous-looking enough, but this taxonomic ambiguity highlights the peculiarity of what is the “difference that makes a difference” and how destabilizing it can be for notions of authenticity.
Or maybe it doesn’t? A. J. Liebling, in his 1962 New Yorker essay “The Soul of Bouillabaisse Town,” wades deep into this taxonomic quagmire and arrives eventually at the conclusion that: “This is a world of constantly diminishing certainties, and the disappearance of even a negative one is a heavy loss; never again would I be able to say with assurance that there was no rascasse in America.” Perhaps in the 1960s this disappearance of certainties felt more urgent and destabilizing than in our own historical moment, when permeability of boundaries is the order of the day. And perhaps the rascasse turns out to be one of those culinary shibboleths, the insistence thereupon but a synecdoche for the assertion that bouillabaisse simply cannot be made “true” outside of Marseille? But true to whom? Is the authentic bouillabaisse that which contains more of the “right” fish or that which contains what is cheapest and freshest at a given moment? To which spirit are we enjoined to be true: that of the restaurateur protecting the integrity of the local specialty or that of the (perhaps mythical) fisherman? For my own part, I’m going to go say the fisherman, and you can mistake that for romanticism if you want, but I actually just want to be able to spend more money on booze.