JOST A MON

My primary objective was to go and eat cod in the Viana do Castelo. No, not à la Margarida da Praça, nor à la Gomes de Sá. In the end what I had, let's see if I remember, was "sliced cod with maize bread on a bed of baked potatoes and salted turnip tops."

It was served by caterers à la russe, one course following the other. It was more chic, was in fashion in Panjim, and in Paris according to the aide to the Crown Procurator. Nobody, however, knew the convenience in India, where people perish from the heat, of a dinner à la russe. Perhaps there was the apprehension that the food would freeze with the heat. 

The priest, nevertheless, was annoyed with the fashion. He wanted the whole larder on the table including the ham in its sack, procured on a returnable basis if not consumed, "so that the abundance could be seen," he murmured with legitimate pride. 

But he compromised when told that in this way the guest ate less and could neither have second helpings nor eat just the best. 

Accustomed to the old practices, the good old man helped himself distractedly to what was on the table: sweets, fruit and would be surprised when the waiter offered him ham or risotto. 

When fish was served after the soups, he became indignant; he assumed he had been deprived of his arroz refugado which should have been served according to the old custom. "Fish is not for such dinners," he roared, since he could not envisage fish except in a curry or fried and served with fonchró, the common rice.

The conditions and prohibitions with which the making of a successful bouillabaise is hedged around make it a problematic dish for the home cook, at any rate for the home cook who lives more than an hour or so's drive from the coastline between Toulon and Marseille. My house in the Vaucluse is an hour and forty minutes from Marseille, assuming good weather which is necessary on the twisting roads of the Lubéron. Other fish soups are less contentious in their composition, a fact which may make them appealing for those who are less beguiled than I am by what Spinoza called 'the deep difficulty of excellence'. In any case, over the years at my homes in Provence and Norfolk (less so in Bayswater) I have cooked burrida, the hearty and accommodating Genoese specialty; cotriade, the warming and economical potato-oriented Breton dish (sometimes seasoned simply through the addition of seawater); the soothing matelote normande, of which more shortly; the exuberant Portuguese fisherman's stew caldeirada, enough to make any one of us into a lusophile, and graced with the additional blessing of reheatability in the form of the excellent fish has ropa velha de peixe; the fiery but somehow light, refreshing, life-affirming fish stews of Thailand, spiked with chilli and lemon grass and the glamorous but refreshing exoticism of that suddenly convenient country (only hours away!); the paradoxical red-wine-using matelotte and raito, the former with its disturbingly phallic and alive-seeming eel, the latter with its elusive but comforting taste of cod; the equally coddy Basque ttoro, its origin betrayed by its telltale unpronounceability (my brother was fond of speculating whether, in Basque versions of the game of Scrabble, values were reversed, so that players only won a single point for using letters such as q and x); the crude Greek kakavia and the egg-and-lemon-enhanced psarosoupa avgolemono; the tasty Provencal soupe de poisson with its punchy rouille and promiscuous willingness to accept whatever is put into it (perhaps the most adaptable and portable of all these national soups); the chowders (from chaudière, stewpot, a word which also refers to the kind of domestic gas boiler whose explosion was to kill my parents) of North America, expressive of that continent in their hearty emphatic blandness; the delicate Bergensk fiskesuppe, which the unfortunate Mitthaug used to prepare with great displays of energy in his attempts to get the freshest possible, indeed the freshest imaginable, cod and coley, rising before dawn to go to Billingsgate and returning with fish, which, as my father observed, a competent veterinarian ought to have been able to resuscitate; indeed, our own grey little country is almost the only one which fails to have its own indigenous version of fish soup, even the Scots having their surprisingly edible Cullen Skink.