Intrigue! duels! sustainable seafood!

I love old recipes, but they’re seldom very practical. It may be romantic to borrow a recipe from Alexandre Dumas, but when you realize your pantry is short on partridge, and that your servants are non-existent, earlier culinary epoques lose some of their charm.

I was surprised, then, and pleased, to see this 1904 bouillabaisse recipe in the New York Times. Terrified by long ingredient lists, and complicated instructions, I’ve never attempted bouillabaisse. This recipe is, however, simple, if not entirely recognizable.

In fact, given the flexibility of the recipe, I wonder if there’s a more sustainable way to make this. What was in 1904, a fish stew becomes in 2010 a big steaming bowl of mercury.  I would modify the recipe by using pacific halibut, hybrid striped bass, and making sure that the shrimp were US farmed (warning: farmed shrimp are more sustainable but flaccid, bland and blah blah blah). Be sure to ask your local seafood dealer how the fish were caught. And read up on the literature! The sustainability levels of seafood are volatile, and the best choies aren’t necessarily the most obvious ones. Quick tip (and a pet peeve of mine)–there’s no such thing as organic seafood! Your grocery store may try to tell you otherwise but take it from me, you’re probably better off buying that tin of sardines than the 10 euro “organic” salmon.

The Monterey Bay Seafood Watch Program is a great place to start learning about how screwed we are. Equally depressing, is this article by Mark Bittman. And by depressing, I mean educational. It’s a necessary read and I think highlights a lot of the complications around ethical eating–as Bittman points out, it’s not just a matter of eating from a “good” list.

Finally, on a lighter note, here is a picture of Dumas in the kitchen. That is one cooking show I would definitely watch.

“Next on the show is Gerard de Nerval, showing us how to prepare a lobster bisque!”