The French Chef: Bouillabaisse a La Marseillaise [video]

openvault.wgbh.org

3 pointsdevchix2 comments

Dated 10/07/1970. Julia goes shopping for fish, makes a bouillabaisse. What I liked: real messy cooking, not over-produced like the cooking show of today. Instructions on the different kinds of fish and how they look. A giant fish skeleton being cooked. The choice of fish available for sale at the market these days are anemic by comparison. The chaos of a working fish market, for the first time I get the connotation of a "fishwife", she's loud and brassy. The vendors used a beam balance scale, I don't see this IRL any more, had to google for what it's called. Best of all: Julia doing puppets with the fish, and the lobster.

Fishermen used to sell their catch right off the boat in the centre of Marseille, at the bottom end of the "Vieux Port" (old harbour). Octopus, congers, and sometimes others, were still alive.

My feeling is that people were also eating more seafood. Many fishmongers closed down although the seafood counter in local supermarkets is still miles ahead of anything you see in, say, the UK.

One other thing is that how much the environment degraded since the 70s-80s. On the coast itself the variety of fish and sea life you can see has really collapsed. You need to go to the islands (of the Count of Monte Cristo fame), which are now a nature reserve but also simply farther away from the city, to see what the coast looked like underwater 40 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com