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Bouillabaisse a LA Marseillaise

Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise is a fish stew made with onions, olive oil, various fish, tomatoes, lemon, sherry, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turbot and whiting share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 33 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Bouillabaisse a LA Marseillaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Slice the onions and place them in a large, flat stew pan.

  2. Add olive oil and fry the onions until pale brown.

Build the broth and simmer

  1. Add the fish pieces to the pan and cover with warm water.

  2. Sprinkle salt, pepper, bay leaf, diced lemon, and diced tomatoes over the fish.

  3. Pour in the sherry or light wine and add the peppercorns.

  4. Simmer until the fish is cooked through and flavors meld.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turbot + whitingtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Turbot + lobstertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Whiting + lobstertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Turbot + crayfishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Frying them until pale brown builds sweetness and a savoury base for the broth.
Olive oil
Carries heat for frying the onions and adds fat that carries flavour through the stew.
Fish
Provides the main protein, which cooks through during the simmer and flavours the broth.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, helping to round out the broth's flavour.
Sherry or light wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer until the fish is cooked through and flavors meld. Fish cooks quickly and turns dry and tough if overcooked, while too little simmering leaves the broth flat. Watching the fish closely balances both.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, fish, turbot, whiting, lobster, crayfish, pepper):

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, fish, turbot, whiting, lobster, crayfish, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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