Today’s food and travel quiz question is this: what do stargazy pie and bouillabaisse have in common? Pour yourself a large rather than a medium glass of wine with dinner tonight if you answered that both dishes contain fish heads and potatoes.
But they’re not the only things dangling at the end of this epicurean rod. Both of these dishes are as familiar to Cornwall and Marseille respectively as Daphne du Maurier and Zinedine Zidane. Yet, were you to invite yourself into any domestic kitchen overlooking the Med or the River Tamar this evening, your chances of seeing either dish being prepared for a family dinner would be remote. Stargazy pie and bouillabaisse are, today, both dishes that mostly only exist for tourists prepared to pay the high prices charged in restaurants that locals would seldom go within 100 yards of.
For natives, these are dishes of the imagination. Historical whimsy has long overtaken pragmatic appetite, resulting in the creation of an odd nostalgic epicureanism, where a region becomes known for a dish which is no longer eaten by anyone who lives there all year round. These are heritage dishes more remembered than eaten, kept alive by nostalgia rather than appetite.
One of the many differences between Cornwall and Marseille is that stargazy pie has been allowed to rise, and most definitely fall, on its own petard. Cornwall may be the poorest county in England, but people still feel they’re able to afford to eat something more appetising than a dish featuring pie crust, fish bones and fish heads.
Bouillabaisse in Marseille
Sardines
Bouillabaisse however, has been given something of a state-sanctioned lifeline. Or, at least, that was the intention back in 1980 when the city fathers created an official charter stipulating exactly how the dish should be created by restaurants located within the city limits.
I’ve come to the south of France to see what happens when food is put on a life support machine, and whether we Brits should consider following suit by creating our own city charters to specify exactly how everything from Eccles cakes to pease pudding should be made. A recipe for trouble.
Marseille is a blowsy, blue-collar kind of place. Infinitely more untamed, noisy and charismatic than any other city in France, its location at the bottom tip of the country has long made it the point of entry for émigrés from Tunisia, Algeria, Italy and Armenia among many, many others. These diasporas create a multi-cultural community where you’re as likely to detect the waft of falafels and tabbouleh as you are baguettes and brie lingering in the briny, sun-imbued air.
I meet for café au lait at the Vieux Port with Verane Frediani, a Marseille-based food historian, film producer and author of the wonderful book, Taste The World In Marseille, from which the photos in this piece are taken.
One of the great dishes of France was allowed to evolve as Marseille itself opened up to new influences
“I have fond summer memories in my childhood where my dad and uncle would go fishing and my aunt and grandma would then prepare the fish soup, spending a lot of time grinding small fish with a ‘moulinette’. The taste of the broth was unique. We would sometimes cook bigger fish in that broth and eat it all with rouille or aioli and bread,” Verane recalls. “But now, people in Marseille rarely cook bouillabaisse at home. Yet many people go fishing in and out of Marseille and still make their own fish recipe with their catch. Sea and sun belong to everyone. That’s the beauty of it.”
For the uninitiated, bouillabaisse was traditionally a peasant dish, created by fishermen putting either the very best of the catch (or the leftovers, depending on who you believe) to one side of their vessel before boiling them over a crackling wood fire in seawater with local herbs and plants when they got ashore.
When saffron arrived from Persia into Marseille’s port in the Middle Ages, it was integrated into the recipe and when tomatoes arrived from South America, they were also included in bouillabaisse.
So far, so adaptable; one of the great dishes of France was allowed to evolve and transmute as Marseille itself opened up to new influences and ingredients.
So why did the city decide that something as radical as a charter was necessary in order to protect bouillabaisse? And protect it from what exactly?
“In the 1970s, as mass tourism took hold, many restaurants in Marseille started to serve cheap bouillabaisse made with bad quality ingredients. They were serving frozen fish from the other side of the planet and canned fish soup,” opines Verane to me.
“Fish stew exists in every coastal city on the planet but the specificity of the Marseille bouillabaisse resides in its connection to the local terroir, in the tastes of the local and fresh herbs used to prepare it. That’s what the charter written in 1980 was about. The three main restaurateurs serving bouillabaisse in Marseille at the time were fed up with unfair competition by unscrupulous restaurateurs who were serving fake bouillabaisse at dirt cheap prices. The charter codified the techniques and the way the dish must be served, and made clear which specific local fish and ingredients must be used. By doing so, they established it as a noble dish once and for all.”
Bouillabaisse
Passionate stuff. But these newly ratified specifics didn’t reckon with marine pollution. The stipulation that any restaurant serving up bouillabaisse would have to buy large quantities of scorpion fish, monkfish, weever and John Dory (not to mention wild local fennel and wildly expensive rock fish and saffron for the ‘rouille’ broth) needed ever deeper pockets.
As fish stocks dwindled and the myriad fish required to make ‘official’ bouillabaisse increasingly were sourced from the eastern Med, prices soared and, inevitably, were passed onto the diner. In 2025, a sanctified bouillabaisse requires an outlay of at least £150 for two diners before drinks and service. This peasant food now comes with a bill that is more appropriate to potentates.
In the name of journalism, I splash the cash in Miramar. Overlooking the jostling yachts in the central harbour, it’s a restaurant that plays by the rules when it comes to bouillabaisse. First, what is essentially a piscine mass grave is presented to my table; the myriad fish piled precariously high on a cloche. Then the rouille arrives in a shallow bowl. The colour of a bordello banquette, it’s a stampeding gavotte of flavours, spearheaded by some deeply unctuous chilli, gravid garlic and the diplomatic go-between of the mild-mannered saffron. The bowl (which absolutely should not be emptied by the diner) is taken away and returns with the fish bathing on top. The scorpion fish (or rascasse) is the highlight; its briny bitterness cavorts with the sweetness of the John Dory. But the other fish invited to the party make each mouthful a constant assemblage of moving parts; all rising and falling with the natural grace of the tide. It’s immense. It’s filling. It’s extremely expensive and I didn’t notice a single Marseille local once enter or exit the restaurant during my two-hour dining experience. Noble as its intentions were, the bouillabaisse charter has rendered the dish delicious but divorced from quotidian life. Yet, a few streets back from the waterfront, I manage to meet a piscine Pankhurst.
The fishy freedom fighter is named Linda Herve and she and her husband Vila set up the minuscule Pain à l’ail four years ago. With room for just a handful of tables inside and a scattering outside on a concrete alleyway, their project focuses on seafood sandwiches. There’s octopus, there’s lobster and, just recently, a new addition; the bouillabaisse sandwich.
Our sandwich is ten euros so we’re not modernising bouillabaisse; we’re taking it back to its origins
“It’s an irony really that bouillabaisse was protected so it could survive with the charter,” Vila tells me on a sun-drenched afternoon, while we sit together outside the café. “What it actually did was take it away from local people as it became too expensive. We decided to ignore the rules by not offering classic bouillabaisse, but something inspired by it instead.”
A moment later, Linda brings us half a fresh baguette, stuffed with a mountain of seafood, some of which, such as seabass, is categorically not on the prescribed bouillabaisse charter list. It matters not. The rouille broth and an additional pot of aioli are placed alongside this behemoth to be dipped and scraped out while eating. This isn’t a culinary innovation; it’s more a spirited, street-level fightback against a ruling that, in many ways, is no longer fit for purpose.
“Our idea is to make Provençal food done in an English street food way,” Vila tells me. “Bouillabaisse is such an old dish. But the most important thing is the quality of the product. It shouldn’t have to be the same fish all the time as the charter dictates. Our sandwich is only ten euros, so I don’t think we’re modernising bouillabaisse; we’re just taking it back to its origins.”
Liberation takes many forms. As it transpires, despite the stringent regulations, dishes will answer only to the climate, to the soil, to the water and to the people. They tried to tie bouillabaisse down. They could not. And herein lies a lesson for us all.
Dinner will always perform a Houdini act on diktats and decrees. Whether hewn by changing seasons or fiscal deprivation, dishes will adapt naturally.
Bouillabaisse is a tale of fishy Darwinism and if anyone on local councils in Northumberland is thinking of creating a pease pudding charter; please pause to consider whether it’s a good idea. As Vila and Linda have discovered, red tape is no match for hunger.
Eurostar run around 16 trains a day from London to Paris from where you can take a connecting train to Marseille. Eurostar tickets from £39 one way (2hr 15 min journey time) and connecting train to Marseille from £21 one way (3hr 12 min). Book at eurostar.com and sncf-connect.com. More info at marseille-tourisme.com
