“Provençal cooking is based on garlic. The air in Provence is impregnated with the aroma of garlic, which makes it very healthful to breathe.”

— Alexandre Dumas (Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine)

Originating from the port city of Marseilles in the Provence region, bouillabaisse (pronounced boo-yah-base) was traditionally a relatively affordable use of local produce for a humble dinner. Served hot, the main components of bouillabaisse include a saffron-tinted broth teeming with seafood (preferably the leftover parts from your fishing trip, a.k.a. the less glamorous bits that restaurants rejected), grilled bread, and a rouille garnish. Legend (or history, who knows?) says that the fishermen of Marseilles created this dish using their off-cuts, concocting a flavoursome, and basically zero-waste, stew (#sustainability).

A telltale sign of the dish’s south-of-France heritage is its heavy reliance on Provençal herbs and spices being (methodically) thrown into a pot to bring this dish to life – with a notably heavy-handed use of garlic. And if that rings too subtle, the generous handling of seafood is a pretty obvious clue too.

Thanks to the French belief in its kind of ‘culinary centralisation,’ a delicious regional dish could bet on its shiny clamshells that it would soon climb the ranks to become a ‘national’ dish of sorts. This has proven true in how you can find bouillabaisse offered in pretty much any true French restaurant, however far from Marseilles itself. With its increased popularity, the dish has also taken on more luxurious pursuits relative to its pre-19th century ‘fishmonger-scraps’ origins (bony fish remains replaced by juicy langoustine).

Ergo, there are now bouillabaisse recipes aplenty for all tastes and budgets. We love our seafood, so no complaints here:

• This one advocates for the more traditional (albeit slightly appropriated) ‘regional’ approach in using “whatever seafood that’s around you.”

• Or if a more straightforward, “tell me exactly what and when to chuck into a pot, and make sure I can buy everything from Coles” recipe suits you better, click here.

A cool retro fact about this dish is that in its hometown of Marseilles, the broth and garnished bread was served separately from the fish (bony Mediterranean fish). An even cooler fact is that Julia Child (yes, the original Julia chef in Julia & Julia) said it.