Steeped In The Sea

A 'new' Northwest stew brims with Old World charm

GENERALLY SPEAKING, seafood soups and stews fall into one of two camps. Either they are modeled after the mother of all seafood stews, the Provençale delicacy known as bouillabaisse, or they are milk-and-potato affairs of the chowder persuasion.

Bouillabaisse-style seafood dishes, even ones that do not make any claims toward authenticity, generally include the same basic — Mediterranean — roster of ingredients. Garlic, olive oil, saffron and tomatoes form a foundation in which all manner of shellfish and fin fish are cooked together. From the Italian-style cioppino served on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco to the most refined bourride served in Michelin-starred restaurants in Nice, these soups and stews follow a similar pattern.

Bouillabaisse and soups of that ilk are said to be adaptations of Greek fishermen's concoctions, which, in turn, were supposedly based on a seafood stew developed by Venus herself. As the tale goes, the goddess lulled her husband, Vulcan, to sleep by feeding him a soporific, saffron-scented seafood stew; this freed her up to cavort with Mars.

Somewhat less ancient, fish soups from the chowder family take their name from the chaudiére, a French soup pot that was used in colonial Quebec. The original chowder pot was a three-legged, cast-iron thing from which we have inherited our images of a witch's cauldron. These soups may or may not contain seafood, but they always contain bacon and potatoes. Their popularity gradually extended down into New England and beyond.

Both the tomatoes and potatoes that characterize these traditional seafood dishes are fairly late additions to seafood soups. Before indigenous foods were exchanged between America and Europe, neither the tomatoes nor the potatoes were available in the Old World. What, I once wondered, would a seafood stew based entirely on Old World ingredients taste like?

When I was still in my 20s and determined to do something relevant and new, I was working at a small café on San Juan Island. In those days, I was slavishly devoted to regional ingredients and determined that I could devise original dishes using nothing more than my rough-hewn skills and the raw ingredients that presented themselves in the ever-unfolding diorama of the seasons.

For a while, our tradition at the café had been to serve seafood stew based on the Provençale model. With tomatoes and fish stock, it took substance from pieces of salmon or halibut too small to use as dinner portions; it was finished with mussels, clams, oysters and prawns cooked to order.

One winter, I wanted to make a seafood stew that would reflect the golden light of the changing season in our own little corner of the world. So I abandoned the tomatoes and built a soup based on apple cider. Apples and apple cider were, after all, far more closely associated with the Pacific Northwest than tomatoes. In no time, I had devised a soup that made both me and the restaurant's patrons quite happy.

The apple cider provided sweetness and a tangy, acidic edge. Heavy cream afforded a certain richness. And in a nod to the Provençale tradition, I kept both some fresh fennel and a pinch of saffron threads in the new formula. Both the autumn crocus from which saffron is derived and a wild fennel grew with abandon on San Juan Island. So, I reasoned, these ingredients could be considered local.

But for all my efforts to create something new, I had stumbled upon a formula that was at least as old as the bouillabaisse and chowder models from which I had hoped to break away. In Normandy, cooks had been simmering seafood in mixtures of cream and apple cider for hundreds of years. I think on some visceral level, I must have known this all along.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.