Instructions: Bouillabaisse is a legendary seafood dish that is time consuming and labour intensive to prepare. A true bouillabaisse requires a lot of expensive fresh fish from Mediterranean that yields an ever diminishing catch. The name comes from the French words bouillir, meaning to boil, and abaisser, meaning to lower or, to wit, to boil on a low flame. An authentic bouillabaisse is a combination of two dishes: a saffron-tinted fish soup followed by various fish poached in the soup, then filleted. The last dish is eaten with lashings of rouille, basically a sauce of red chillies, egg yolk, garlic, cayenne, and olive oil. The legend has it that bouillabaisse was originally made with seawater. Devised by Marseilles fishermen, it was a way of consuming the least desirable portion of their catch. Although there are almost as many variations on the recipe for bouillabaisse as there are on that for chilli.

To make a real bouillabaisse, you have to cook for a minimum of six people and you need at least a kilo of poissons de roche per person." Poissons de roche is a collection of catch-of-the-day from the local fish market.

Minguella believed the most important of them is the small, bony rascasse, both white and red, because it gives a deep flavour to the bouillabaisse.

(Rascasse is also known as scorpionfish and is sometimes used in both the first and second courses.) Depending on the catch of the day, other good rockfish for the dish include conger eel, anglerfish, red or tub gurnard, and weever. After all the ingredients are prepared, you brown onions, garlic, and tomatoes in olive oil, then add the clean and cut up rockfish and let it cook for fifteen minutes until it becomes a sort of paste. This is the heart of bouillabaisse. Then add boiling water, fennel, parsley, salt, and pepper and let it boil for an hour before passing it through a food mill. Make fish stock by simmering 1 to 2 pounds heads and bones of white-fleshed fish only in 2 to 3 quarts of water about 2 hours. Add water as needed. Strain stock into large kettle. Add clam juice, beer, carrots, celery, garlic, leek and saffron. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer until carrots are crisp-tender. Combine cornstarch with 1/2 cup wine and stir into simmering sauce. Simmer 5 minutes, then season to taste with salt, white pepper, hot pepper sauce. Once the soup is prepared, you add slices of raw potato and the tender fish, which are monkfish, loup, John Dory, chapon (a Provencal term for red scorpionfish), and whatever shellfish youd like, maybe a few mussels, and cook another twenty minutes, adding some saffron five minutes before you serve. Sometimes adding a big shot of pastis just before serving can juiced up the dish

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