If for variety you would present a brown fricasey, an arrangement in browns as startling as a poster by Lautrec or Anquetin, add anchovy to your seasoning, exchange white wine for red, and introduce into the mixture truffles and morels, and mushrooms, and a spoonful of catchup. The beauty of the colour none can deny; the subtlety of the flavour none can resist.
Another step in the right direction, which is the old, will lead you to sole pie, a dish of parts. Eels must be used, as is the steak in a pigeon's pie for instance; and nutmeg and parsley and anchovies must serve for seasoning. It is a pleasant fancy, redolent of the days gone by.
"BOUILLABAISSE";
A Symphony in Gold
Hear Wagner in Baireuth (though illusions may fly like dust before a March wind); see Velasquez in Madrid; eat Bouillabaisse in Marseilles. And eat, moreover, with no fear of disenchantment; the saffron's gold has richer tone, the ail's aroma sweeter savour, under hot blue southern skies than in the cold sunless north.
How much Thackeray is swallowed with your Bouillabaisse? asks the cynical American, vowed to all eternity to his baked shad and soft-shelled crab; how much Thackeray? echoes the orthodox Englishman, whose salmon, cucumberless, smacks of heresy, and whose whiting, if it held not its tail decorously in its bread crumbed mouth, would be cast for ever into outer darkness. Sentiment there may be: not born, however, of Thackeray's verse, but of days spent in Provençal sunshine, of banquets eaten at Provençal tables. Call for Bouillabaisse in the Paris restaurant, at the Lapérouse or Marguery's (you might call for it for a year and a day in London restaurants and always in vain); and if the dish brought back something of the true flavour, over it is cast the glamour and romance of its far southern home, of the land of troubadours and of Tartarin. But order it in Marseilles, and the flavour will all be there, and the sunshine and the gaiety, and the song as well; fact outstrips the imagination of even the meridional; the present defies memory to outdo its charm.
And it must be in the Marseilles that glitters under midsummer's sun and grows radiant in its light. Those who have not seen Marseilles at this season know it not. The peevish finder of fault raves of drainage and dynamite, of dirt and anarchy. But turn a deaf ear and go to Marseilles gaily and without dread. Walk out in the early morning on the quays; the summer sky is cloudless; the sea as blue as in the painter's bluest dream; the hills but warm purple shadows resting upon its waters. The air is hot, perhaps, but soft and dry, and the breeze blows fresh from over the Mediterranean. Already, on every side, signs there are of the day's coming sacrifice. In sunlight and in shadow are piled high the sea's sweetest, choicest fruits: mussels in their sombre purple shells; lobsters, rich and brown; fish, scarlet and gold and green. Lemons, freshly plucked from near gardens, are scattered among the fragrant pile, and here and there trail long sprays of salt, pungent seaweed. The faint smell of ail comes to you gently from unseen kitchens, the feeling of Bouillabaisse is everywhere, and tender anticipation illumines the faces of the passers-by. Great is the pretence of activity in the harbour and in the streets; at a glance, mere paltry traffic might seem the city's one and only end. But Marseilles' true mission, the sole reason for its existence, is that man may know how goodly a thing it is to eat Bouillabaisse at noon on a warm summer day.