'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict
Recipe For Success
Many years back, I made the mistake of following a recipe for Cod and Pears. My guests gamely pretended to like it but the only humane thing to do was to call back the plates and give them bread and cheese. One of those sitting at the table was soon to commit a similar sin with rubberised monkfish that that the knife would not cut and the fork would not pierce .These things happen. It is the price paid for eventual culinary triumph, as was gifted me last night.
This time, I had decided on a bouillabaisse, something which I had never cooked before, and as I studied various recipes, I realized just what I had taken on. In cooking terms, we live in a world where much of the work can be done for you, so I started looking around supermarkets for a bouillabaisse sauce, and when that failed, I tried my fishmongers (yes, there is a real fishmongers five minutes from where I live) who said that they had never seen such a thing. The local delicatessen also drew a blank.
By now, I was three days away from having to place a bouillabaisse in front of six people. I steadied my resolve by analysing what a bouillabaisse is all about. The recipes vary wildly, but there are common ingredients; flavours of France and North Africa.
It is, of course a kind of fish stew, or casserole, and I decided to wing it with some Moroccan spicy paste, (any spicy, chilli based paste would do) two onions, a whole chopped garlic, spaghetti sauce, soup de poissons, a couple of red chilli peppers, saffron, fresh coriander, basil and some herbs de Provence. The fish had to be the kind that would not break up or flake on heating and I drafted in some squid, prawns, lobster, scallops, mussels and monkfish. This might sound like a lot of ingredients, but when cooking for a table of people, it is not the simplicity of content, it is the simplicity of cooking that counts.
At four in the afternoon, I got out my wok and fried up the onions with about one third of the chopped garlic and one finely chopped, red chilli pepper. I then lowered the heat down as far as it would go and poured in my jar of spaghetti sauce, adding the basil, and coriander. I then separately steamed the mussels and took them out of their shells. I chopped the monkfish into cubes, and added the mussels, monkfish and whole scallops into the mix. Now, the soup de poisons (about half as much as the spaghetti sauce) went in and some more chopped chilli pepper to taste, along with saffron and herbs de Provence. Then in a small frying pan, I fried the squid with another third of the garlic and added that along with some Moroccan hot paste. Finally, I added the prawns and broken up pieces of lobster, along with more coriander, garlic and chilli to taste. The whole thing was getting a bit thick, but an extra cup of soup de poissons sorted that out, and after five more minutes on as low heat as possible, and a pinch more saffron for good luck, that was that.
When the guests arrived, I put some garlic bread in the oven, gently heated up the stew and served with some steamed vegetables on the side. If it had been summer, it would have been a salad.
Now you know when they say the food is good and when it really is. This really was. In French ‘baiser’ is ‘to kiss’, and you can bouillabaissez ma derriere from now on.
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