Fish Soup For The Soul

When in the Port City of Marseille, Savour What the French Do—a Bowl of Bouillabaisse

- Debashree Majumdar

In little more than the three decades of my unremarkable albeit fast-changing life, eating fish has been a constant. I have licked the tender Hilsa’s thick mustard gravy off my fingers at home and at celebrations. I have savoured the rich, creamy sauce of a baked salmon, seeking comfort on a dank European winter afternoon in a land far from home. That’s just how much I love fish. So, on our visit to the French port city of Marseille, it was obvious for my spouse and I, a pair of Bengalis raised on a healthy diet of fish, to go hunting for the famous Provençal fish soup—bouillabaisse (pronounced: booyahbase). As a precursor to settling to a lunch of this traditional multi-fish broth, we decided to start our day with a visit to the fish market at the Old Vieux Port, along the Mediterranean coast.

To get there, we picked our way through the quiet, gritty Marseille streets that looked somewhat like a grand-mère (grandmother) dressed in sequins. This, mainly because of the newly installed sleek tram network zigzagging through Marseille’s arterial roads. The transport network’s revamp was undertaken to celebrate the city’s inclusion in the European cultural landscape. In 2013, Marseille was recognised as the European Capital of Culture along with Košice, Slovakia. It’s safe to say that Marseille is not Paris. But it does serve as France’s primary port, which opened up to the Mediterranean almost 2,600 years ago with the arrival of the Greeks. Eventually, Algerian, Corsican, Moroccan and Italian communities settled here, creating a melting pot of sorts. And the flavours of this bubbling pot are more evident in the Massalia kitchens than on its streets.

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