Homard à l'américaine

Maarten, je zag wat over het hoofd in French Provincial Cooking.

"We are at Montpellier, and as madame Nénette observed, in tones of only very mild reproof, in answer to my question about her lobster dish [Homard à la Nénette],  'Ah, nous ne sommes pas en Provence, Madame, ici c'est le Languedoc.' So Madame Nénette's lobster or, rather, crawfish dish is her own special version of langouste à la sètoise or civet de langouste, a dish remarkably similar to the famous homard à l'américaine. Now the port of Sète in the Languedoc was the birthplace of the chef Pierre Fraisse, who is said to have originated this famous dish, and one way and another it seems fairly obvious that, with its tomato and oil and garlic, it was adepted from the methods traditional to the fishermen of Séte and, indeed, on the whole Mediterranean coast, and never had much to do with America or with Amorique (the old name for Brittany), where they had no oil, no tomatos

Homard, lobster, kreeft

and precious little cognac; but after the 1914 war patriotic Frenchmen decided that it was absurd that a famous French dish should be attributed to America, so they came to the conclusion that the name was due to a spelling mistake, and did not stop to think of the more rational explanation that the dish was a typical Mediterranean one. Fraisse, the sétois chef who first put the dish upon his menu in his Paris restaurant (Noël Peters in the Passage des Princes) had spent some years in America (these facts are all on record and can be read in M. Robert Courtine's book, Le Plus Doux des Péchés, 1954) and the whole thing seems to be explained.

This comfortable theory is swiftly demolished by Pierre Andrieu in Fine Bouche (1956) who says that although Fraisse may have been the originator of the name, he certainly did not create the dish, which was well known under the name of homard Bonnefoy, at the restaurant of that name, before 1870. He quotes Philéas Gilbert as saying that the dish was originally known as langouste niçoise. So we are back to the mediterranean origin of the dish. The Sétois and Provençal versions of the dish are simply the langouste à l'américaine, a rather rougher form. Nénette's variation consists in the addition of aïoli to the sauce, a quite common usage in the Provençal and Languedoc fish cookery. Her recipe can be compared with the américaine version Escoffier gives in his Guide Culinaire, with prosper Montagné's note on the civet de langouste of the Languedoc in the Larousse Gastronomique, and with yet another version from Pierre Huguenin's Recettes de ma pauvre Mère."

Langouste, rock lobster / spiny lobster, langoest / hoornkreeft