It is given its French name because it has no other, except in Genoa, where it originated. The Genoese then gave the world Christopher Columbus by way of making amends, although there are two views on that.
I include Bouillabaisse reluctantly. When eaten where it is made commercially it is a lethal dish. I go further and say that nobody who saw it prepared (that is to say, nobody who was not nurtured on the Mediterranean) would touch it with the end of a pole.
Prepared in a private house by someone in whom you can place reliance, it is edible, but to say more would be fulsome flattery. I was in bed eleven days after the last one I ate in Marseille and the doctor who attended me told me he did practically nothing else but battle for the lives of stupid foreigners whose judgment had been clouded by the bouillabaisse legend.
Horrors are the basis of Bouillabaisse. They are its raison d'être because they are more or less free. Even Provençal fishermen, who make German Jew pawnbrokers seem reckless spendthrifts, seldom have the gall to charge anything for this marine garbage... except, of course, to visitors.
In fact, if it amuses you, and you and your guests are of an adventurous turn of mind, sling in an old bycicle tyre, a worn out primus stove and a mail order catalogue. They won't make a great deal of difference and they are too large to get stuck in your throat. Let's get it over and forget it.
